The ethnic and parish tables: what the record holds, and what it does not

1900s — present · the West End, the parishes

The Belgian table: The ethnic table with the deepest documentation in this city is the Belgian one, and its whole course stands in the West End Bakery entry above — the Flemish-speaking grocery stores of the neighborhood's first blocks, in the historian's account, and the bakery that outlasted them all. The Hungarian thread of the city's food runs through the same counter: the rye bread a South Bend customer followed across the river in the late 1980s, from the closed Lentsch Bakery to Seventh Street. Both are printed whole in the bakery's entry and at pointer size here, as the ownership rule requires.

The Polish table, measured honestly: Across the river, Dyngus Day belongs to the halls, and the hall kitchens cook by the hundreds of pounds. In Mishawaka the record reached holds no hall table of that kind. The city's documented Polish measure is a bakery's: West End's 4,700 paczki on Fat Tuesday 2026, made by a Belgian house for a Polish feast — a sentence that is itself the finding. Mishawaka's Poles are in its record (St. Joseph's and the later parishes are Religion's), but their tables, in the sources reached for this section, left no document of the South Bend kind, and the absence is printed rather than filled. The Italian tables stand at their entries' sizes — the Macri deli line and Papa Vino's above — and the Mexican table's founding house stands at Hacienda's.

The parish table that documents itself: One Mishawaka parish table is documented whole, and it is a modern one. St. Monica's "Bibles, Burgers, and Brew" — Wednesday evenings through June and July in the pastor's backyard, the Knights of Columbus grilling burgers, attendees bringing potluck — began in 2018 as part of the parish's three-year plan, in Today's Catholic's account of June 2025, the plan's themes running Party, Pray, and Proclaim. It is printed at its documented size: a parish supper series with a catechetical theme, the kind of table the earlier record rarely wrote down. The older parish foodways — the fish fries, the festival kitchens — left no account in the record reached for this section, and the motherhouse on Dragoon Trail, whose 400-acre Carlisle estate the Sisters of St. Francis bought in 1943, carries no kitchen or farm record in the sources reached either; both absences stand named in this section's note, the sisters' own archives and the diocesan paper's Lenten listings as their settling sources. The motherhouse itself is Religion's, and it is not retold here.

Sources:

1. West End Bakery entry of this section — the Belgian neighborhood's grocery stores and the Hungarian rye-bread thread, from the Tribune and the West End neighborhood history as cited there.
2. Today's Catholic (30 June 2025) — St. Monica's Bibles, Burgers, and Brew: the Wednesday summer series, begun 2018 under the parish's three-year plan; the Knights of Columbus at the grill; the potluck; the rectory backyard.
3. Religion section of this history — the Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration's purchase of the 400-acre Carlisle estate in 1943 and the motherhouse course.
4. Food section of the South Bend history — the Dyngus Day hall tables of the west side, the contrast this entry is measured against, pointed to and not retold.