Comfort Food Revival
Tuna Casserole as Culinary Redemption
If love languages exist, food is mine.
I don’t just love to eat, as that implies blind scavenging. Instead, I love to dine, to break bread, to be immersed in the experience, and I love the road that leads me there. It’s even better when someone comes along for the ride: I enjoy entertaining and aspire to make the people around me feel the same emotions about food as I do. Sharing a meal is a lovely way to get to know someone.
Every family, much like every chef, has a personality to their menus. I’m fortunate to come from a long line of fantastic cooks, each unique in their own way. The recurring theme is that we cook with love, so the food is hearty, flavorful, and created in great quantities. There’s always room at our table. In early adulthood I assumed those skills of meal planning and cooking were genetic, etched in my DNA by generations of working class Italians.
My cooking ego came naturally but not rationally. I didn’t know what I was doing in the kitchen. For the longest time I didn’t like measuring ingredients or setting a timer. I thought the perfect, completed menu item would just materialize from my hands. I couldn’t stand leaving lumps in muffin batter (made out of a box, just add water) even though the directions told me I should. What did they know? I thought that adding butter, salt, and parmesan cheese to linguine would magically make it into pasta agli’olio. I was mistaken. Impatience is my nemesis: to this day I’m still notorious for undercooking. Dozens of pie crusts and whole roast chickens have fallen victim to my refusal to trust the listed cooking times. Diversity in menus wasn’t a strong suit at first, either. Early in our marriage my husband asked me, gently, if we could please have anything else besides pasta as a side dish. I didn’t realize that rice or potatoes were something people ate on a Tuesday night.
Fortunately, while the ability to cook isn’t genetic, the instinct to learn can be.
I grew up in a house where dad went to work and mom took care of the home. Dinner was on the table at 6. My mom was (and is) a terrific cook and I always appreciated those evenings. When I left my parents’ home for the first time I lived with my cousin and his family for a couple of months. Frank and Ann worked in Philadelphia and lived in a suburb. A long commute was how they started and ended their days, so time together on weeknights was limited. The preparation of dinner, no matter how simple, was always an experience. They lit a candle and turned on the radio; they had chardonnay with Cracker Barrel cheese and crispbread crackers while Frank cooked dinner. We had straightforward, comforting food: roasted chicken with macaroni and cheese, Mexican lasagna, tuna noodle casserole. In retrospect, I realize my cousins cooked like newlyweds, even when they had me and their nearly-adult daughter in the house. As a new (although older) wife and mom, that became the picture in my head of how I wanted dinner with my family to be.
On my journey to learn to cook I collected infallible recipes to counter my tendency towards distraction. My 1998 edition of How to Cook Everything is well-loved and as a result has completely fallen apart. My favorite pages are disintegrating and live in Ziplock bags. Cookbooks by Giada DeLaurentis and Jamie Oliver are welcome in my kitchen because their recipes include instruction to “taste it” while preparing. Even Rachel Ray joins me at times: she encourages every home cook to stock their pantry in a way that they can feed themselves or others at a moment’s notice. Anyone can master these recipes. The voice is conversational and practical, reflecting the tone I’ve always wanted in my kitchen.
My cooking quickly got better, by leaps and bounds. I learned techniques and how to balance flavors and textures. I developed instincts of my own. These days I can stir a pot of boiling linguine and tell by the way it feels whether it’s close to being ready. After many failed attempts I learned how to cook rice — add water and salt and leave it alone. I make a killer lasagna, alfredo sauce two ways, and have a flawless recipe for Kung Pao chicken. I joyfully overthink menus for holidays and tailgates and Friday night happy hours. Cooking for a crowd, especially when there’s a theme, makes me deliriously happy.
I’ve encouraged my kids to eat different kinds of cuisine and have reasonable expectations of how they’ll receive what I serve. Truth be told I don’t have much else to offer in the way of life skills: I can’t teach them to sew or garden or change a tire, so the very least I can do is give them an appreciation for good food. They aren’t all home runs but I can always depend on a few go-to meals that make everyone happy: red sauce and meatballs, pulled pork in the pressure cooker, beef stew, fried chicken and macaroni and cheese.
There’s been a shift recently. Whether depression, midlife crisis, decision fatigue, or the disease of “too busy”, I have begun to lose the knack for cooking that I’d worked so hard to achieve. I wish I could blame COVID-19 or the frustration of preparing food for teenagers but the fact is it’s been deteriorating for a couple of years. I have become unrecognizable in my own kitchen — truly, the only space in my home in which I previously felt completely in control.
I knew things were falling apart when I failed the old standbys. At first it was the occasional one-off: overcooked flank steak, under-seasoned red sauce and tough meatballs. Our favorite fried chicken was heavy and oily, under-salted and just not very good. The cheese sauce was perfect when I mixed it with elbow macaroni and put the dish into the oven. I set the timer for longer than I should have and ran off to do something else. What came out of the oven was dry and sad.
A few days after the unfortunate mac and cheese incident I served an undercooked pork shoulder. Of course the pork wasn’t dangerously undercooked — that would be a very different story — but it was chewy and tough, not the lovely, tender, shredded bits that hold any number of BBQ sauces and can be served as a sandwich or over nachos. I looked at my children and apologized yet again. They smiled, kindly and quietly, and couldn’t meet my eye. After they went to bed I put the roast back in the pressure cooker, added a bit of liquid, and walked away. It was perfect when it came out, but no one was awake to see it.
To say that I had crashed and burned as a cook is an understatement. I couldn’t manage my time so we began eating later and later each night. The pandemic, in a twisted, strange way, should have been my opportunity to shine a light in darkness: I could have been one of those people who learned to bake bread or create cookie masterpieces. A better version of me would have anonymously delivered homemade soup to my neighbors in the dead of night. Instead, my family spent an absurd amount of money on GrubHub delivery and takeout from our neighborhood restaurants.
By summer, I couldn’t shake myself of my gastronomic funk.
My confidence was shot. I screwed up grilled cheese. I couldn’t get the skillet’s temperature right to make pancakes. I made burgers and hot dogs and tater tots for an embarrassing number of dinners. My meatballs were okay but they weren’t quite right. One night, out of desperation to master something new, I made rice and beans from dried beans. It was pretty fantastic. I saw a glimmer of hope. I needed to find a way to build my culinary ego back to where it belonged.
I thought about my cousins. I remembered how happy I was while living with them, during such a hard time in my very young life. Our dinners together were a huge part of that: I looked forward to it the same way I looked forward to time with my mom and dad. I thought about Frank’s tuna noodle casserole: wide egg noodles, cream of mushroom soup, canned tuna. He may have put peas in it and it’s possible there were crumbled Ritz crackers on top, but I really don’t know for sure. There was nothing sophisticated about it, no special twist. It was comfort food, plain and simple. I needed to go back to basics.
I found a recipe for from-scratch tuna noodle casserole and waited until an evening that I could take my time and pay attention. When the day arrived I stopped at the store on my way home from work. I knew I had tuna and noodles in my pantry. I couldn’t bring myself to buy canned soup; instead I chose fresh mushrooms and heavy cream. I melted butter and gently sauteed the sliced mushrooms. I strayed just once to add a clove of minced garlic. The smell of it on my hands was pure heaven. I added flour and made a roux, then carefully poured in milk and heavy cream. I folded in a healthy dose of mayonnaise. After it thickened I tossed in the tuna and half a bag of frozen peas, then stirred in the egg noodles, undercooked in anticipation of baking. I poured the mixture into a glass baking dish, topped with cracked pepper and a handful of crushed crackers. 30 minutes later it came out of the oven in all of it’s creamy, bubbly glory. It tasted exactly the way I wanted it to: the texture of the sauce was smooth, the noodles still had some bite, and the tuna and mushrooms weren’t overpowering. I imagined making it with imported Italian tuna and mixed wild mushrooms, maybe some Dijon mustard, substituting roasted cauliflower for the noodles. I dreamed about iterations with capers, Romano cheese, just a touch of something tomato-y and a little bit more garlic. I was proud. I was excited.
My kids refused to eat it. I didn’t care. I knew then that Mamma will someday again be the master of her kitchen.
