This has been a challenging, no good, difficult 2017. Sure, sure, there has been positivity along the way. (Its persistence is shocking, isn’t it?) Yet there have been plenty of just-plain-tough days, too. And when things are low, when they come just shy of bottoming out, there is a dish I return to for solace: The Casserole.
Spoken aloud, the words are an incantation. They bring my best friends into the kitchen when I’m pushing against the empty, a lifeboat delivered in a perfume of lemon and curry. We whisper it across cellphone lines, the cascading syllables mouthed like lullabies. We find a stable center in a dish made of tender ingredients.
The casserole is a love letter from my 15-year-old self, a form of caloric communion. It fosters a shared reverie, though my three closest friends now live across L.A., Memphis and Jersey. The dish, for Ginny and George and me, is canonical. There are no additive adjectives, despite a quivering backbone of name-brand canned goods. Others may call it Chicken Divan, and that’s fine. For us it is more simply evoked, a primal form of reassurance.
I first met Ginny in high school, where we passed decidedly unliterary notes throughout English class, giggling until we rolled to the floor. Ginny’s mother, Peggy, was an airline pilot and would spend weeks in places that evoked my as-yet unrealized wanderlust: India, England, imagine that? The casserole was a gift she gave to Ginny, a mother hug wrapped in cheddar and crispy bread crumbs.
In turn, Ginny gave it to George and me.
Before it goes into the oven, the casserole quivers, shaking in its 9×13 pan. She’s not sure how things will pan out. In just less than a half hour, she emerges with a consistency that rights an upside-down world. The casserole is an act of magic, delivered through the unlikely medium of cream soup and mayonnaise. It is Better Crocker trapped in amber, hearkening to a time when we still believed food science could make us better.
You don’t even have to salt it. The factories do the work for you.
As teenagers, we would level a full casserole in minutes, savoring molten spoonfuls while we watched daytime TV makeover shows. At first bite, a 90s-style wallflower would walk on set, visibly worn by the twin trials of career and motherhood. Will she ever take time for herself? By the last, the woman’s hidden goddess is revealed. Drawing fingers around the edge of the pan, we’d lick the last of the curry-stained sauce from the edges. The makeover, the meal, they were a transformation of the mundane.
The dish soothes my nerves now just the same. Acolytes, my friends and I share cellphone photos of our latter-day casseroles’ rugged terrain, pre-shredded cheddar forming a thousand molten intersections. We speak of it with awe and introduce it to the people we love. In return, they make it for us, an act of Grace. (I love you for that, Grace.)
In my adult kitchen, Hellman’s mayonnaise and Campbell’s Cream of Chicken drop to the pan with a sucking sound and bind memories, broccoli submerged beneath a cheddar-sealed surface. Almost 40, I stand over the sink and lick the uncooked mixture from my fingers, blank trails drawn down the edge of a wooden spoon. Bright yet heady, the miracle of lemon juice and curry powder mixes on my hands with the fat of a torn-up rotisserie chicken. I smell the Madras beneath my fingernails for days.
In Patricia Bunning Stevens’ Rare Bits: Unusual Origins of Popular Recipes, the etymology of the casserole’s formal name—Chicken Divan—is spelled out. It begins with an origin story. The dish, we learn, was first made in the 1950s at The Divan Parisienne restaurant in the New York Chatham Hotel, its name an attempt to evoke “continental elegance.” (This may be technically correct, but my casserole was invented in Ginny’s mom’s kitchen, and I have photos of her recipe cards to prove it.)
Photo by Jenn Hall