My mother died more than 20 years ago, and I'm still trying to recreate the dish she used to serve us, writes Wendy Litner.GETTY IMAGES
Wendy Litner is a lawyer-turned-writer in Toronto and creator of the TV series My Dead Mom.
Each September when I was growing up, my mother marked the first day back to school by making my brothers and me a tuna-noodle casserole. It was the beige 1970s classic: canned tuna, three different types of noodles, cream-of-mushroom soup, and a layer of crushed potato chips on top. When it came out of the oven, the chips were browned unevenly; some were toasted while others remained stubbornly pale. Despite it being nobody’s favourite, or anywhere near that, it was a ritual to which we submitted.
My mother died in 2004 when I was 24. In the years that followed, grief took on strange shapes. It lived in the expected places – hearing her anthem, Rod Stewart’s Rhythm of My Heart, on the radio, or walking into a waft of the Elizabeth Arden Red Door perfume we’d buy her every Mother’s Day. But it also lodged itself in less inspired spaces, like my kitchen. This surprised me at first because my mother was not that fond of cooking – too many steps, not enough of an audience present. She collected cookbooks for their pictures. When asked to bring a favourite recipe to my sister-in-law’s bridal shower, she brought a takeout menu. She made “homemade pizza” once for a boyfriend by taking them out of the fancy restaurant box, plating them herself, and graciously accepting compliments for the thinly sliced potato topping. It’s a family secret I vowed to never tell, but these are the kind of details I find myself holding onto most tightly. Grief has a way of lowering the bar on confidences, turning secrets into love letters.
Opinion: Our lost connection to the family recipe
So, when my first day of second-year law school rolled around a month after she died, I found myself trying to recreate her tuna noodle casserole. Not improve it. Not refine it or update it with fresh herbs or artisanal tuna or a béchamel sauce made from scratch. That would have been a kind of culinary revisionism. What I wanted was fidelity. I wanted the exact wrongness of it. The particular sogginess of the noodles. The correct imbalance of soup to tuna. The unmistakable crush of potato chips from a bag that has sat open in the cupboard a little too long.
This turned out to be surprisingly difficult. Memory, it turns out, is an unreliable cook. I would make a version that was too structured, too deliberate – measuring everything with the kind of anxious accuracy she never bothered with, cooking the noodles until they were perfectly al dente instead of her soft overcooked tangle – and it always felt like a parody of my mother’s. Her tuna noodle casserole was so itself, existing in a delicate equilibrium of mediocrity and comfort.
But I kept trying, and became fixated on the details. Was I using the wrong shaped noodles? How long had she boiled them? Did she drain the tuna thoroughly or leave a bit of liquid for flavour cohesion? Did my crushed chips not include enough dangerously jagged pieces? Was there more soup that I remembered? With each version that could not ape my mother’s, I wondered if this failure made me a worse cook than my mother, or a better one.
The homemade dishes that make us think of our mothers
More than anything I wanted to succeed so I could make the casserole for my brothers. I imagined presenting them the dish as a kind of a portal in a Pyrex. They could take a bite and, for a moment, we would all be back together again, sitting at our kitchen table in the suburbs, each in our chairs, my mother at the head of the table regaling us with a story of something she’d read or done that day.
A year into my efforts, I told my brother about my disappointment in not being able to make Mom’s tuna noodle for him. “Why would you?” he asks. “It was terrible.”
But of course it was! Maybe not outright inedible, but it was, by all reasonable standards, not good. But what does that matter when I am trying to summon our mother with tuna?! The casserole is not a dish to be enjoyed, I explained to him, but a practice to be enacted, a moment to be conjured, an inheritance to carry. It’s an endeavour that sits at the intersection of memory and maintenance. My brother thought I might be putting a lot on wet tuna. “I just remember complaining about it,” he said.
His reasonable distaste did make me wonder: What do we owe the food of our dead? Some memories only stay alive if you keep re-enacting them. But how do we decide which legacies are allowed to end? Maybe the ones with crushed potato chips on top?
Regardless, I continue. And every time I get closer to making a mess of those chips just as my mother did, she is holding my hand (and then telling me to clean up). In the more than 20 years since she died, I feel her most not in the big moments – her birthday or Hanukkah – but in smaller, more tactile recognitions. This is how she did it. This is how it looked. This is how it smelled. I preserve my mother’s tuna noodle not because it’s good but because it’s proof that my mother once fed me. That she once loved me.
My mother’s kitchen rituals have drawn us closer together
I have come to accept that making this casserole is an act of translation, and like all translations, it’s imperfect. Something is always lost. The kitchen is different. My casserole dish is different. I am older than my mother was in my memories of her making this, which introduces its own quiet disorientation. But something is also preserved, stubbornly, against all odds. This casserole has outlived its original context and entered the more dangerous territory of tradition. The tuna noodle persists as something my family recounts – half-recipe and half-myth, an absurd and referential piece of our history.
Recently, my nephew – an infant when my mother died, and now in his early 20s – made it for his girlfriend’s first day of law school. Though he couldn’t quite bring himself to commit to the original – he used black rice instead of noodles – I am still moved by his effort. He never knew my mother or ate at her table, and yet here is the grandchild of her bad casserole. There is something so my mother in this mutation. She had a lifelong commitment to going against the grain. There was never a grain she didn’t go against. I hearted the picture he sent in the family chat, as did my brothers, their wives, and their kids – all of us living in different cities and countries. And so, in this way, my mom still keeps us together, just as she would have wanted – with her at the centre.
My kids, meanwhile, would love nothing more than for my mother’s tuna noodle to die off. They hate it. Every time I make it, they push their plates away, refusing even to try it – which has, in its own way, become a new first-day-of-school tradition. It occurs to me that they, too, might one day feel obligated to make a bad recipe of mine. Perhaps it will be my lemon chicken soup, which has been described as “too lemony.” Will they one day stand at a stove, with one lemon too many, and think of me as they squeeze it? Will they eventually come around and make their mom’s version of Nana’s tuna noodle? Perhaps with orzo?
If we do owe the recipes of the people we’ve loved something, maybe it’s this: that we keep letting them call us back, in whatever altered form, as we ourselves become altered with time, so that our loved one can sit down at the table with us again.
So long as my children sit at my table, I will make their least favourite casserole. I will flake the tuna. I will scrape out the mushroom bits from the soup can. I will crush the chips. I will slide the dish in the oven until half those chips burn and need to be picked off. I will take it out and smile when it looks, reassuringly, a little off. Not quite right. Exactly wrong. I’ll take a picture and send it to my brothers – the closest thing we have now to sitting down together. I will say the quiet part out loud: I miss you. I miss Mom. Remember her bad casserole?