JULY 2020
EVEN THOUGH IT’S SUMMER and I should be making a light, warm-weather meal for dinner, I have a craving for lasagna.
A recipe card titled MOM’S LASAGNA sits nearby on the counter, but I don’t really need it. I pulled it out of the recipe box from habit. This is a dance I have done enough times to know the steps by heart. With deft movements, I get the onion and garlic going; add the ground beef, sweet Italian sausage, hot Italian sausage, and season them; then I move on to the besciamella, which is a twist I made to my mother’s recipe ages ago much to her consternation.
The kitchen fills with the pungent garlicky aroma that I remember from our favorite restaurant in Florence, and my eyes involuntarily shut for a moment as I savor the flavor in the air. After a teaspoon of self-satisfied laughter, I quip to myself, Hey, I should have my own cooking show.
The lasagna noodles are next. But I am interrupted when the phone rings. It’s a robocaller asking if I want to extend my car warranty. Really? Now? I don’t know a single person who hasn’t received this same call about forty times. None of us need our car warranties extended. Attention robocallers—yes, you, all of you selling warranties, telling me that my Social Security card has been stolen; warning me that someone has charged seven hundred dollars on my Amazon card, which I don’t have; and so on—please stop.
Enough already.
Still, the timing of the call is such that it could have easily been my mother calling from a world beyond ours to tell me that it’s not really lasagna unless I use ricotta cheese. This is a disagreement we had for years and a point that she made to me regularly and with good-natured enjoyment as if we were debating two sides of a spending bill on CNN.
Except there was nothing to debate other than preference. There are only two issues with lasagna. One: Do you use ricotta or not? My mother said yes. I say no need. And two: Who gets the crispy corners? My mom and I agreed that this is the best part of any lasagna. It’s often the source of family fights and secret picking before the dish gets to the table.
Am I right? I am always stunned when I hear about people who don’t like this part. Are they also among those who push the cream-cheese frosting on carrot cake off to the side because they don’t like it? That’s a move I will never understand.
Can we agree that carrot cake, as delicious as it might be, is nothing more than a delivery system for cream-cheese frosting, which itself is a reminder of the sweet taste of your first kiss from your first crush?
Getting back on point, there is much more to lasagna than the four crispy corners. In a well-made lasagna, the flavors blend and mesh thoroughly during baking but still contain tiny pockets where the bite packs an intense burst of oregano or basil or a piece of wine-soaked sausage with a nugget of melted Parmesan attached like a salty barnacle. It’s a dance down the Spanish Steps performed on your tongue, and it makes your entire body, from the hair on your head to the tip of your toes, stand and applaud.
This is why the dish has survived with its recipe relatively unchanged since the Middle Ages. It’s the reason I fell in love with cooking. I was eighteen and living on my own for the first time and emerging from my Chef Boyardee phase—that brief period when everything I made came from a can or the freezer. I wanted to make lasagna. I loved my mother’s lasagna almost as much as I could love anything. One afternoon I drove home and my mom handed me the hand-written card that is on my kitchen counter today.
My mother’s lasagna had its roots in my Nonnie’s kitchen, which meant it really had its roots in Italy, where the ancient Greeks are said to have brought the first recipe to Rome in the second century. Meaning my mom’s recipe had been tried and tested for ages. It was her go-to for every special occasion except Thanksgiving and Christmas.
“What should I know about making it?” I asked.
“It’s easy,” she said. “Come over and watch me the next time I make it.”
“Watch me” was the key phrase in her invitation. Lasagna is one of those things you can make off a recipe card, but my mom never followed the recipe exactly. Neither did my Nonnie. The basics are the same, but it’s always a pinch of this, a little of that, maybe a little extra of something else. You can take a freeway or drive the blue highways and back roads and end up at relatively the same place, but the experience along the way influences how you feel about the trip.
I still remember the first time I did it on my own in my tiny little house. I took it out of the oven, picked off a bit of one corner, and when I finally tasted a full-size piece, I thought, Whoa, that’s amazing. I can cook.
Over time, it also became my go-to. Even when The Silver Palate Cookbook’s chicken Marbella became the thing everyone made when they wanted to impress family and friends, I still relied on my mom’s lasagna. I made it for Ed and Wolfie. I made it for my parents. I made it for my brothers. I proudly announced its arrival fresh from the oven when all of us gathered for special occasions at the beach house. I shared its story to kick off the ninth season of Valerie’s Home Cooking, an episode that I titled “Honoring Nonnie.”
Somewhere along the way, I varied my mom’s recipe. Instead of using ricotta cheese the way she did, I substituted Parmesan and a rich béchamel, a white sauce made from a roux and milk. I called my version lasagna alla besciamella. My mom called hers lasagna the way it’s supposed to be made.
After my first cookbook was published, she called me to say that she found a mistake.
“Where?” I asked.
“The lasagna,” she said.
“What’s wrong with it?” I asked, concerned about a misprint.
“There’s no ricotta,” she said.
“Oh, we’re going to do this?” I replied.
“I’m sure it’s still delicious,” she said. “It’s just not right.”
I laughed. “Okay, you English-Irish woman.”
* * *
Perhaps the only part about lasagna that rivals the burnt corners is taking the leftovers out of the fridge the next day, which is what I do. Next comes the unwinnable debate: Is leftover lasagna better heated up or cold?
For those preferring it warm, I recommend cutting a piece and putting it in the oven at 350 degrees for about twenty minutes; try to avoid a quick hit in the microwave. The wait is worth it. I slice a slender piece, center it attractively on a plate, and eat it cold. It reminds me of a multilayer cake, savory minus the sweet, and it is satisfying in a way that tells me my taste for lasagna the previous day was more about feeding my soul than it was my stomach—the same as it is now.
I have been worrying about Ed. I have also been thinking about how Wolfie is managing, how close he is to Ed, and how that love is like a string he keeps tying in ever tighter and smaller knots in a courageous and unflagging effort to keep a much larger ship from drifting away in a strong current. My son keeps so much inside. Divorce created an invisible wall. Most things with either one of us are on a need-to-know basis. Cancer hasn’t changed this.
Sometimes I have to pry the information out of him. I am concerned that he inherited the best of Ed and the worst of me.
Yet sometimes we stare at each other the way family members do, with familiarity and fear and instant understanding, no words necessary. I love my son till it hurts. The way I think he loves his dad and me.
In therapy, people talk about needing a toolbox—different tools for different situations. My mom’s recipe box is mine. I go to the recipe box when I need ideas. I also go to it when I need to commune with those who came before me and still hover in that invisible place nearby. It provides reminders and helps me to reset in ways I didn’t anticipate when I brought it home after we moved my mom and dad to assisted living. The recipes are written in my mom’s beautiful script. Some are as crisp and fresh as the day she wrote them. Others are worn and stained, containing not just recipes but stories; they are three-by-five platters on which memories are brought to the table and deliciously revisited.
Like the lasagna. When I took out the card yesterday, I could hear myself calling her that first time and asking how to make it. Today, it’s another question: How do you get through it? Where is the card for that? Under appetizers? Meat and poultry? Salads? Dessert?
It’s not like my mom and I were even that close, not in the way where I called her for advice during troubling times. Then again, maybe I underestimated her—and us. When I was younger, I had lots of questions. What do you put in your meat loaf? What was in Nonnie’s red sauce? How do you make your cheesecake? She always told me.
Let’s see what she has to say now.
I go rummaging in my toolbox and pull out a card. Onion rings. Bent and discolored by what I assume are blotches of grease and oil, the card appears to have spent a lot of time next to the stove. Except I can’t remember her making onion rings that often. The next card I fish out is titled NEW ORLEANS RED BEANS & RICE. She really got into New Orleans–style food after she and my dad moved to Louisiana, and even though I wasn’t living at home at the time, I remember her serving these with nearly everything when I visited.
I try one more card.
Now it’s like a game. Like I am dealing tarot cards.
Bread.
Huh. Simple white bread. I read the instructions out loud. “Two cups of water, lukewarm; one package or a cake of yeast.”
I stop and think. I have big jars of yeast. How much is a package? Usually about two and a quarter teaspoons.
“Three teaspoons of sugar; two teaspoons of salt; and three cups of flour. Heat and add five tablespoons of margarine. Add three more cups of flour, mix and knead for about ten minutes. Put into a greased bowl.”
The recipe ends there. I look at the backside of the card, hoping to find the rest of the steps, but it’s blank. I see only a smudge, a fingerprint—my mom’s.
“How many rises, Mom?” I say. “Do I make a loaf? Or do I turn the dough into little rolls? What’s the deal? Where’s the rest? It’s not like you to leave it unfinished.”
Then I get it. She is talking to me as clearly as she did in the past. In the Bible, it’s referred to as the staff of life. At the Last Supper, Jesus passed out pieces of unleavened bread, a symbol of his broken body. It provides nourishment to the physical body. It also feeds the soul. It is a gift from God. It can sustain life. It can be shared.
“Take this and eat . . .”
I don’t think it was an accident that I pulled out a recipe for bread. Or that the last steps were left for me to figure out on my own.
* * *
The recipes in that little box tell more of a story than I was aware of, from the early days of my parents’ marriage when my mom was learning to cook and fighting for acceptance to my first eight years in Delaware and my parents’ moves to Michigan, Los Angeles, Oklahoma, and Shreveport. Almost all of my memories of family meals are from when we lived in Delaware. I recall sitting around the kitchen table or, if it was a special occasion, in the dining room, where my mom had painted one entire wall with a beautiful mural of the Italian coast from the perspective of people sitting on a balcony.
I have no idea how she found the time to design and paint such a monumental work while taking care of four small children and preparing three meals a day for a family of six. Plus, she sewed all my clothes, as well as clothes for my Barbie dolls. We moved to Michigan when I was eight; to LA in 1971; and by age fifteen, I was spending most of my time at the studio working on One Day at a Time.
A year or two later, someone on the set introduced me to café au lait and I thought my taste level had skyrocketed. At eighteen, I was living on my own and loved to eat out at the Moustache Café, a trendy French bistro on the even trendier Melrose Avenue. I ordered quiche, a dish that struck me as the height of sophistication. I learned to make it on my own and proudly served it to my mom and dad.
This is quiche.
Quiche, meet my parents.
Then my mom called one day to tell me that she had found a recipe for Famous Amos cookies.
“The actual cookies?” I asked.
“Yes. Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies,” she said.
“I need to copy that recipe,” I said.
For kicks, I sift through the dessert section of the recipe box and there is the card: FAMOUS AMOS COOKIES.
The day I brought home my mom’s recipe box, I also gathered an armful of cookbooks, several dating back to the early fifties and one from 1947. Aside from a bunch of dishware and utensils and pots and pans that I didn’t need and decided to donate, I looked long and hard at her pot holders: two oversize gloves that literally had black burn marks on the palm sides. The fabric was paper thin; she had used them for ages, as long as I could remember, until they were unusable.
I put them in the trash. Remembering this helps straighten out my anxiety about Ed and Wolfie. Recipes can be shared. It’s an ongoing conversation. The handling of hot dishes, the heavy lifting, the labor itself, I was going to have to do that myself. But I appreciated and accepted any and all help along the way.
* * *
Which is ironic. For so long, I was afraid to ask for help. In anything. I was under the false presumptions of youth and ignorance that I shouldn’t admit I didn’t know how to do something. It turns out that asking for help is easy. Years ago, I asked Ed to teach me how to play a particular Patty Griffin song that I liked. I sang a bit of it for him.
“Oh yeah, that’s easy,” he said, grabbing a guitar—one of the many that always seemed to be within his arm’s reach—and strumming the song as if he had played it a hundred times. Then he handed me the guitar and showed me the first and second chords and the up and down rhythm of the strum as he slowly guided my hand.
“Okay, now you try it,” he said.
I began the song in fine form but stopped abruptly just a few words in and turned to Ed with a look of helplessness.
“How do you do that chord again?”
“Oh come on, it’s easy,” he said.
“Easy for you.”
I can still picture where the two of us were sitting that night.
* * *
My mom’s recipe box gave me access to her meat loaf, scalloped potatoes, and risotto. It also gave me secrets and stories. It gave me a connection to family history. It reminded me of all the meals that got us through difficult times and helped us enjoy the good times. It gave me permission to change and tweak ingredients to my own taste. It taught me that cooking has as much to do with feeding our spirits and souls as it does satisfying our hunger—and most of what we hunger for has to do with our spirits and souls.
The last time I made dinner for my parents was in the summer of 2016. We didn’t have reason to suspect it at the time, but it would be the last time we would eat together. My dad passed away four or five months later, and my mom was not strong enough to make the trip again. I served lasagna. What else was I going to make? At the table, my mom sat next to me and after taking her first bite, she turned to me, nodding and smiling as she finished chewing.
“This is delicious,” she said. “What did you change?”
“Not a thing, Mom,” I said. “It’s your recipe.”