Taking Up the Mantle

(by Jenna Dutcher)

Author's reading

Recipe for Kathy’s Famous Green Bean Casserole:

1 can Cream of Mushroom soup (reduced salt)

2 cans French-Style Green Beans

1 family-size container of French’s Crispy Fried Onions

salt and pepper to taste

1. First things first, you’ll have to locate the recipe. A secret family recipe, your mother always told you, until one day you read it straight from the back of the French’s Fried Onions container. Turn to that container now for the details.

2. Preheat the oven to 350 F. Never mind that you’ve always had a weird anxiety about ovens, that you’d starve if your wife wasn’t in charge of the kitchen, that you’ll need her to check afterwards that it’s properly turned off. Realize that it’s the fifth winter holiday without your mother, and this is the only dinner recipe you ever made together.

3. Drain both cans of the green beans. Mom would have pointed out that packaged foods are rife with added sodium, and no one needs that in this day and age. Make sure every ounce of liquid is drained from the can (and then maybe rinse them for good measure).

4. In your mother’s 1 1/2-quart baking dish that you lied about stealing for your own graduate school apartment, mix Cream of Mushroom soup with the green beans and 2/3 of the family-sized French’s Crispy Fried Onions. You know the recipe only calls for the small container of onions, but you’ve always loved them. That’s why you’d eat them as an entire meal in college, carefully measuring out the handfuls to ensure you didn’t go over the day’s allotted Weight Watcher’s points.

5. Add salt and pepper to taste. As you add the bare minimum of pepper (because the recipe does call for it, after all), try not to think about all the times your mother would reach over and shake pepper onto your food so that you would stop eating.

6. Refocus on the task at hand. You promised to bring this dish to the party in two hours, and you can’t get distracted, not by mourning, not by anger.

7. Bake for 30 minutes or until hot. Push away the memories of Grandma’s baked goods from Thanksgivings past, of you and Mom sneaking spoonfuls of raw cookie dough, of Mom letting you lick the spoon the one time you made Halloween sugar cookies when you were in preschool. Remember that she bought ghost cookie cutters just for that occasion. Forget that you never used them again. Forget that you never found them when Dad asked you to clear her stuff out of the house after her death.

8. Top with remaining 1/3 of the fried onions. Sneak a taste while doing so, just because. That’s worth three Weight Watchers points, circa 2008—Lord knows how they’ve changed the program by now. You certainly haven’t stayed up to date.

9. Bake 5 minutes longer or until onions are golden brown. Here’s the clincher: This is when it tastes best, and you’re going to want to dig into the casserole all at once. But remember the pride you always feel in having a dish to bring to a party (even though you’re absolutely hopeless in the kitchen the other 364 days a year).

10. Take up the mantle from your dead mother. This dish has always been the one thing Kathy would bring to the party, and now it falls to you for every family and friend holiday gathering.

11. Turn off the oven, make Heather confirm, and allow the casserole to cool.

12. For transportation, cover the cooled baking dish with its accompanying green rubber lid. You swore right, left, and center that you didn’t steal this set from your mother, but she’s not here now to claim it, so you might as well put it to use.

13. Go to the party. Climb into the car with the covered casserole wrapped warm in a tea

towel, your daughter chattering away in the backseat.

14. Feed an entire found family with the one kitchen skill your mother passed on. Wonder

what else you have left of her—in yourself, in your daughter, in the glass casserole dish

now empty on the table.

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Jenna Dutcher is a writer who lives in Maryland. She is currently working on her first memoir. She can be found at www. jennadutcher.com.