Imagine 300,000 cabbage rolls. Now imagine preparing them.

The number is a conservative estimate of how many of the meat-stuffed delicacies the parishioners of St. George Antiochian Orthodox Church have made and served in half a century of hosting Lebanese dinners.

If you go

St. George Antiochian Orthodox Church’s 50th Lebanese dinner will be Feb. 1. Tickets are $10, available in advance from church members or at the door, to eat in or take out. Meals will be served from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and from 5 to 7 p.m. Call 601-636-2483. St. George is located at 2709 Washington St.

Begun in 1960 to raise money to build a new church, the Lebanese dinner is one of the city’s most popular traditions, with close to 3,500 meals served to people as far away as Jackson and Port Gibson. This year’s is set for Feb. 1.

“We make around 12,000 cabbage rolls every year,” said Dolores Nosser, who has been involved in the dinner from its earliest days, when about 500 meals were served. “It’s a labor of love. It has to be. You can’t do it any other way.”

The event is officially staged by the Women of St. George, but many of the men and the children pitch in, too. Preparations, which begin several weeks in advance, include patting out 160 pans of kibbee and making gallons of tabouli and green beans in tomato sauce.

In its first years, St. George members couldn’t foresee 50 years of dinners — but they were sure Vicksburg would buy the food.

“They had tasted it,” said Polly Nasif, Nosser’s sister. Church members made it for their non-Lebanese friends, and kibbee and other items were sometimes on the menus of city restaurants owned by members of St. George. “Everybody loved it.”

“We just wanted to pay the church debt,” said Frances Abraham Thomas. “As it progressed, so many people in the town enjoyed the dinner so much, we just felt like we should continue.”

The dinner this year is dedicated to the memory of Tillie Baroudy Underwood, who for many years co-chaired the event and helped oversee kibbee making. The daughter of the late Very Rev. Michael Baroudy, pastor of St. George from 1937 to 1959, Underwood pitched in for any job that needed doing, members recalled.

“She lived from one dinner to the next,” said Donna Thornton, Nasif’s daughter. “She loved it. She was there for everything — every time the doors opened.” Underwood died in December 2008.

In its early years the dinner was held downtown at the BB Club as a sit-down affair with waitresses and white tablecloths. The dining room looked beautiful enough to make you cry, Nosser said, but there wasn’t much of a kitchen. “We had no place to make all that stuff, so everybody took it home and did it. Then none of it came out uniform — people made the kibbee and tabouli their own way. We realized that was not going to work.”

Early successes brought both pleasant and not-so-pleasant surprises. The women thought a $600 profit from selling sweets was “miraculous,” said Nosser, but making stuffed squash, an early menu item, proved backbreaking.

Frances Thomas recalled nearly running out of squash one year before lunch was over, with dinner still to go. Some of the women went out, bought more, and spent the afternoon in the back of Delia Tannous’ dry good store cooking it up. “We had no conception of what we were going to sell,” she said.

Nosser recalled the day she and three other ladies cored 500 crook-neck squash in one day. “That was some job,” she said.

After the new church was completed in the mid-1960s, dinners were prepared in its kitchen, with various church members overseeing the preparation of each dish to ensure uniformity.

Generations now have been in on the cooking.

“The green beans got passed down to me when my father died,” said Gregory Thomas, Frances’ son, whose three children help make kibbee and other dishes. “There’s never a question with them, ‘Do we have to go?’ They want to be there, to be part of it and be able to say, ‘I helped get this done.’”

The next big job will be tackling those cabbage rolls, which usually requires parts of three days.

Church members love it, though.

“We enjoy being with the people as much as we enjoy the cooking,” said Sue Thomas, cabbage roll chairman since the mid-1960s. And smelling cabbage for three days doesn’t spoil her appetite. “I can still eat ’em,” she said, laughing.

“A lot of people come because of the fellowship,” said Rosalie Thomas, another member of the family. “People look forward to coming out and visiting, seeing people they don’t get to see all the time.”

“I always believed it was a great thing for the city of Vicksburg,” Frances Thomas said. “It’s a lot of work, but it gives people a good feeling.”

*

Contact Pamela Hitchins ay phitchins@vicksburgpost.com