Casseroles and Obituaries: How we are remembered

Last month, the Washington Post ran a story about the number of obituaries that were published, in roughly a year, that included a reference to casseroles—430 had been published in in American newspapers and on online platform Legacy.com. The article went on to say that the number of obituaries referencing casseroles on Legacy.com increased by 43 percent from 2019-2020.

Many of these obituaries were for people over the age of 75, a group which makes up more than half of COVID deaths in this country. But also, the article goes on to say, “the obituaries also hint at what we lost: shared meals and the people who cooked them.”

More than 80% of the obituaries were of women. Tuna and broccoli were the most frequently mentioned, not always favorably. But there were men, too, including a man from Syracuse, N.Y. famour for his melanzana casserole.

Food just says so much about who we are and what we value, doesn’t it? It doesn’t surprise me at all that during this pandemic we remember comfort food when we mourn the loss of a loved one. Cooking together and eating together, and the recipes that we followed to make that happen, bring up multi-sensory memories of smell, and taste, and sound, instantly.

Recipes, too, are so much of their own time and place—they can be like poems, really, each word important, and each line adding up to a larger whole, each dish firmly located in a particular place, and a particular time. This article reminds me of another project, the Kitchen Committe—in which a woman, Maggie Mason, found a plastic recipe box at a flea market with more than 800 recipes carefully organized and notated.

Maggie started to share the recipes on Instagram, posting one a day on Instagram. Followers on the site claim the posted recipe and promise to make it within a week, posting comments and feedback back to the Instagram feed.

Some favorites:

Home Baked Beans
Broccoli with Corn Cheese
Candied Sweet Potatoes

The project has a devoted following, with more than 2,000 followers. I love it for so many reasons: the devotion to recreating vintage recipes, the community created around the cooking and sharing, and the very idea that something so everyday as a recipe box can evoke long-buried memories of taste (Velveeta anybody?) and family meals eaten while young. As Maggie Mason said in the article, “for someone like me, who doesn’t have a family recipe box that’s been passed down, it can sort of become a surrogate family recipe box.”

And so, today, I leave you with this thought: what recipes would you most like to share with your loved ones right now? Would you go so far as to make a recipe book? A goggle doc with your favorites to share? A recipe of the month email or instagram post? I encourage you to consider how these simple legacies can mean so much, expecially now when being together in person is still so fraught.