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 types of noodles, cream-of-mushroom soup, and a layer of crushed potato chips on top, browned unevenly from the oven. Despite it being nobody's favourite, 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 expected places but also lodged itself in less obvious ones, like my kitchen. This surprised me, since my mother was never fond of cooking - too many steps, not enough of an audience. Grief has a way of lowering the bar on confidences, turning small details into love letters.
So, when a new school year started a month after she died, I found myself trying to recreate her tuna noodle casserole. Not improve it, not refine it with fresh herbs or a scratch-made béchamel - that would have been culinary revisionism. What I wanted was fidelity: the exact wrongness of it, the sogginess of the noodles, the correct imbalance of soup to tuna. This proved difficult - memory is an unreliable cook, and anything too structured felt like a parody of my mother's.
More than anything, I wanted to succeed so I could make the casserole for my brothers - to present them the dish like a portal in a Pyrex. They could take a bite and, for a moment, we would all be back together at our kitchen table, my mother at the head of it, telling us a story about her 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 asked. "It was terrible."
But of course it was! Maybe not outright inedible, but not good, by any reasonable standard. But what does that matter when I am trying to summon our mother with tuna? The casserole is not a dish to be enjoyed, but a practice to be enacted, an inheritance to carry. "I just remember complaining about it," my brother said. His distaste made me wonder what we owe the food of our dead, and how we decide which legacies are allowed to end.
Regardless, I continue. Every time I get closer to making a mess of those chips just as my mother did, she is holding my hand. In the more than 20 years since she died, I feel her most not in the big moments, but in smaller, tactile recognitions: this is how she did it, how it looked, how it smelled. I preserve it not because it's good, but because it's proof that she once fed me, once loved me.
Making this casserole is an act of translation, imperfect but persistent - my kitchen is different, and I am older now than my mother was in my memories of her making this, yet something is preserved, stubbornly, against all odds.
Recently, my nephew, an infant when my mother died and now in his early 20s, made it for his girlfriend's first day of school. He couldn't quite commit to the original - he used black rice instead of noodles - but I was still moved by his effort. He never knew my mother, and yet here is the grandchild of her bad casserole, shared with my brothers, scattered across different cities. In this way, my mom still keeps us together.
My kids would love nothing more than for this tuna noodle to die off. Every time I make it, they push their plates away, refusing to try it - which has become a first-day-of-school tradition of its own. It occurs to me that they, too, might one day feel obligated to make a bad recipe of mine, and think of me while doing it.
If we 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, 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, scrape the mushroom bits, crush the chips, and slide the dish into the oven until half of them burn. I will take it out and smile when it looks, reassuringly, a little off. Not quite right. Exactly wrong. I'll send a picture to my brothers - the closest thing we have now to sitting down together - and say the quiet part out loud: I miss you. I miss Mom. Remember her bad casserole?