St. Joseph wants you to eat something this Sunday
- Holy Rosary Catholic Church
- Holy Rosary parish celebrates the Feast of St. Joseph on Sunday and Monday by selling Italian delicacies for charity.
Italian-American restaurateur and chef Aaron Confessori (The Boot, Westport Cafe & Bar) had never heard of a St. Joseph’s Table until I brought up the subject earlier this week. I had been describing the glories of the annual event at the historic Holy Rosary parish in Columbus Park: cookies, cannoli, cookies, cannoli! There are other local churches that offer a St. Joseph’s Table — Fat City wrote about the tradition last year — but Holy Rosary, a historically Italian parish, hosts one of the biggest and best-known in the metro. I walked out with so many boxes of Italian cookies (I freeze them and eat them all summer) that I barely made it to my car.
Like Aaron, I had never heard of a St. Joseph’s Table until I moved to Kansas City. Our family didn’t belong to an Italian parish (it didn’t matter, my father stopped going to church in the 1970s when he started complaining that “hippies were playing guitars during mass”) and it’s a Sicilian custom. My Aunt Mary in Lockport, New York, on the other hand, remembers the festivities very well. “They served a dish called pasta con sarde, made with sardines,” she told me, “in honor of a famine in Sicily that ended with the miracle of a huge haul of sardines.”
“And putting on the event was a big production for the parish, with all the cookies and the flowers and the decorations. I think that’s why it’s so hard to find churches that still want to do it. It’s a lot of work.”
