Kids don’t come with instructions.  Yes, we all say that but there are the incessant helps that you get from friends, from strangers, from parents (lots of help from parents).  Seems like an encyclopedia of instructions.

“Don’t take them out of the house the first six weeks of their life.”

“Keep them bundled tightly.”

“They don’t need all those clothes.  Loosen their clothes.  Let them breathe, for Pete’s sake. “

“ They are not ready for solid food yet.”

“He’s too young to walk.”

“Looks like he is ready to walk,; gotta walk him daily.”

“If you don’t sterilize that, they can get germs, causes colic, you know. “

“ Keep their head covered.  Don’t feed them that.  Keep those animals away.”

And then you finally take them into the real world, whether that is sitting on your germ-infested carpet, or in the buggy back yard or in that slimy grocery cart and just sitting in their stroller minding their own business.

When life happens.   Suddenly the biggest, sweetest dog on the planet licks them full square in the mouth, leaving drool all over his face.  Unimagined germs and bacteria unleashed on the world.

And that precious protected little lump of humanity throws his hands up in the air and smiles the smile of the ecstatic.  Brilliant and unfettered from the land of instructions.  Just life worth living.

No emergency room visits follow.  No fevers.  No chronic conditions unless you count a love affair with that hairy creature that is more pure and healthy than most human contact.

So I made a cake.  It’s a Southern tradition.  When someone you know or someone in your church is mourning a death, you go to the kitchen.  I have baked many a cake and dead chicken casserole in the pursuit of showing someone a measure of compassion and care.  My mother did it and her mother did it.  In some places, funeral homes are outfitted with kitchens and reception areas just for this Southern phenomena and churches regularly post times for the post-funeral meal, along with the rites.  And everyone knows the best food is served at funerals.

The cake I made today was a Sock it to Me Cake – an old 70s recipe that should be comforting to an older crowd who is more accustomed to pound cakes and banana puddings than Tiramisu and Dulce de Leche.  It seems there are unwritten rules on what is acceptable as funeral food.  Death makes us hungry, so best loved items fall in the comfort food category where hams, deviled eggs, potato salad, macaroni and cheese, and yeast rolls reside.  Chocolate cake seems to be a good choice as well because chocolate serves as a mood lifter, as any woman can tell you.

My husband will take the cake over to the family, and he will no doubt be invited in for coffee, asked to fix a plate and visit for awhile, meeting people he will never see again.  There will be a group of friends in the kitchen, pouring out coffee and serving as air traffic controllers for the legion of casseroles and congealed salads that will arrive.

It seems that the custom of bring food and eating after funerals has transpired for thousands of years, with each culture adapting their own version of rituals and etiquette.  Why this old fashioned, homemade courtliness?  Why this fixation on food when death is on the menu? Of course, it’s because it is to ease the family responsibilities during this time of grief.  But does it have a deeper meaning?   Is it because we fear death – or is it an affirmation of our survival?  It seems that the ordinary, the simple act of eating together reminds us that we are still alive and not alone.  The very act of eating is a belief in our own existence and a statement of our will to live, even in the face of death.  It’s something we do with others, with companions.

I love the word companion.  From the Latin “companioneum”, the word means “one with whom you would eat bread” – “Con” meaning with and “pan” meaning bread.  So our companions in grief are those with whom we would “break bread.”  Proof that we are not alone.

I have often been the recipient of that type of food love before.  When my brother died too quickly from lung cancer, our home church, the one we grew up in, surrounded us with the casserole brigade and the sweet tea militia.  As my mind began to dwell on what heaven is like, I couldn’t help but hope that the food in heaven is as good as a Southern funeral.

So bring on the Sister Shubert rolls with a healthy serving of relatives and even mere acquaintances.  It’s not Death Warmed Over.  It’s Life Served Fresh Daily.

For a food so indigenous, it is hard to believe that today there are parts of the Americas that are devoid of this staple. It’s true. A good squash casserole is hard to find in Los Angeles. In the culinary capital of nouvelle cuisine, where you can eat at 100 different restaurants from 100 different countries, there are no Southern squash casseroles – a fact quickly identified by my daughter, Katie, when she moved from the bastion of “meat and threes” to the City of Angels. No squash casseroles in restaurants, in cafes, in lunch counters, or Ralph’s deli. Not even a sign of a cafeteria to scoop out the ever-present squash casserole, fried okra, and overcooked Kentucky Wonder beans.

That’s a hard reality for a young girl so Southern she speaks three languages of home cooking – Texas, Tennessee and Alabama. A girl that was raised on grits and grace, Arnold’s Home Cooking, and the Belle Meade Buffeteria.

Because our familial tastes are clearly defined at our Mother’s table, it is no wonder that true homesickness is expressed as a longing for our favorite dishes made for us by our favorite people. I was no different. I longed for chicken and dressing, purple hull peas, and my Mother’s squash casserole.

For Katie, it is similar – my squash casserole, fresh-from-the-garden sliced tomatoes, and turnip greens. It’s a request for attention, for a little Mothering, for an infusion of home values, comfort and love, proof that some things never change.

And for mothers, it is the reason we wrap food in foil for kids to take on airplanes and mail cookies, to lengthen the connection, to make sure they take a little home with them. It’s why we are the 1-800 home hotline for their shopping and cooking excursions. It’s the reason we make them recipe cards, cookbooks and tell them what we are having for dinner when they call home. So they don’t forget.

Katie’s Squash Casserole
4 cups cooked squash (8-10 squash)
1 onion, chopped
½ bell pepper, chopped
2 eggs, beaten
½ cup milk
1 cup grated Cheddar cheese
¼ cup margarine or butter
1 cup cracker crumbs (Ritz or regular)
Salt and pepper to taste
Cook squash; mash. Sauté onion and green pepper in butter until tender. Mix with other ingredients, reserving a small amount of the cheese and cracker crumbs for garnish. Put in a greased 2 quart casserole or 9×12 pan and garnish with cheese and crumbs. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes, uncovered.

I know it’s a little peculiar.  Some people aspire to Chanel perfume or some new celebrity scent that allows you to think for a moment that you are not who you really are.  But the beauty of onions is the little whiff of real humanity they bring to life.

The scent that I have always loved is the smell of onions. 

The smell of wild onions is the smell of new grass and the aroma of good times to come in the spring.  Like some great inviting salad mixed with wild strawberries and a new energy to explore and inhale.

The smell of grilled onions is the smell of summer, mingled with the smell of charcoal, steak and peppers.  The smell of long days and good friends, lingering for just a moment to breathe in a memory of being together.

The smell of green onions is the smell of home cooking, mixed with sliced tomatoes, purple hull peas and skillet cornbread.  It’s a smell that brings on feelings of love for the regularity of life and a grounded sense of who I am and where I came from.

And the smell of the holy trinity – onions, garlic and celery – are the hallmarks of the holidays where our lives and relationships get stirred up into that dressing that everyone requests and forms the recipe of our life.

So while the onion may seem mundane to some, it is the stuff of life for me.

I was of the era before Barbie dolls.

Maybe that’s why I have always loved dolls. Maybe it’s the fantasy. Maybe it’s the innocence. Maybe it’s just the love.

I still have all of my favorite dolls – the Madame Alexander that looks like Mamie Eisenhower, the Ginny doll with sparkly cowgirl outfit and guns, my last baby doll with her starched christening gown and the little Dutch girl with wooden shoes.

There are in the glass front secretary in the hall where my daughter and I sometimes take them out and love them a little before they go back to their glass-enclosed life.

But there is one doll that I did not keep. I wish I still had it. There is a name for this kind of rag doll but I don’t remember what it is. One side has a little white girl with pigtails and pinafore. When you lift her skirt and turn it inside out, there is another doll – a little black girl with curly knotted hair and pinafore. My mother called her the Pickaninny. And she said the other one was me.

Back then, I only knew one black person. She came to our house and cleaned it on Saturdays. I really liked Lena. She always had time for me but there were things I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand why she lived on the other side of town and when my mother picked her up she always sat in the back seat. I didn’t understand why she would not sit at the table with me when it was lunchtime and we made egg salad sandwiches. I didn’t understand why when we went to The Pines Theater to see The Ten Commandments that they sat upstairs in the balcony and we sat downstairs.

I think about that time now and am shocked at the reality that never invaded my childhood existence. And I wonder, what type of dolls did Lena’s daughter have. And did she have the rag doll that I had. And what did her mother call the little white girl.

A family recipe is a funny thing.  Some might think it is just an index card, yellowed and stained with use and reuse.  But really it’s so much more than that.  It’s a memory of love, togetherness, and tradition – conceived in the brain, but carefully stored in the heart.  

It’s a moment in time that can be recreated in your senses, however fleetingly, bringing back loved ones in a sweet fresh way.  That’s why our favorite recipes have names like Aunt Hallie’s Fruitcake or Aunt Lena’s Pecan Delight Pie.

Big Mama taught me to make cornbread when I was four.  She stood me on a box so I could be tall enough to stir the bowl.  My Big Mama wasn’t very big, maybe five foot tall, but she was large in my life.  A woman who raised five children by herself after my grandfather’s death, when the youngest child was only two years old.  Big Mama always smelled of toilet water and dusting powder, and lived in a large house in East Texas surrounded by four o’clock bushes and hydrangeas.  She had taken in boarders to support herself, feeding them from a smokehouse, chicken yard, and garden.

That big old house was full of curiosities, like a kitchen with no cabinets hanging on the wall, but rather blue and green safes with built-in sifters for flour and cornmeal.  And a huge white sink as long as a dining room table and a big white stove that rivaled a Studebaker for chrome and size.

So there we were, me four and she close to 80, both in rickrack bordered aprons, sifting flour, measuring milk and shortening, learning to crack eggs.  Big Mama gently teaching, telling me incredible family stories all the while.  Like how she taught my brother to make lemon meringue pie, about our Cherokee ancestors, about her dad and the Civil War and how she had to keep my premature aunt warm in a shoe box on the wood burning stove – all the while bragging on the way I stirred, pouring out life one cup at a time, serving up family for me.

Sometimes recipes are like earworms. You hear something and you just can’t let it go. It’s always there, lurking in your brain, telling you to take it out and play with it.

Well, sometime during the winter of 2009, I was driving home from church on a Sunday too cold and dreary to want to go out to eat. Typically church and eating out go together like some Pavlovian desire, or more specifically like peas and carrots.

And there on our public radio station WPLN (yes that’s a plug for terrestrial media destined for the public good) was Lynne Rosetta Kasper of Splendid Table. Some people swoon over Car Talk or Fresh Air but for me it’s Splendid Table, the most sensual radio show on air. Kasper was talking about the most unusual pasta dish that she had ever tasted and she was making it with Joshua Bell, the virtuoso violinist. She said it was an authentic 16th century Italian tagliatelle dish served for the most special of occasions – either as a side dish to meat or poultry – or even for dessert. And yes, it has sugar in it, as well as cinnamon, almonds and oranges. I was hooked. Not only did the dish sound great, but that Joshua Bell was someone I wanted to meet, cook with and have a glass of wine with. I could see us in some warm Italian landscape, maybe Fiosele, at a roadside café with that dappled Italian light, with a view of Florence, each of us making light-hearted sophisticated conversation about the best Parmesan Reggianos and the perfect wine to supplement this Renaissance dish. Maybe his most recent album. I would have licked the radio if I had thought it would have brought me closer to them and that dish.

Putting my tongue back in my mouth, I hurried in the house, found the recipe online and saved it to my desktop, just waiting for the special occasion. Lunch Bunch at work? Hardly. Not enough time and definitely no wine to share with such a sublime meal. A weekend meal? Maybe but it would need friends to accompany it. People who could appreciate the subtle simple beauty of the dish. Everytime I turned on my laptop, there is was, staring at me. I had to make it.

It didn’t take long for the perfect occasion to present itself. My writing-slash-therapy- slash-playday group was finishing a six week series of Saturdays where we shared our writing, our goals and a little of our lives. Six women who did not know each other ending up being friends and lovers – lovers of the written word.

Amy, our fearless leader, and her “grief book”. Good grief I say! It’s a book about her love affair with life. CeCe and her memoir that reads like a fine Hank Williams song about your cheating heart. Heather and her brave, inspiring piece about healing and homelessness. Elaine’s gritty beach novel that makes you want to clean the sand from between your toes and read another chapter. And Sallye’s Mavis, the invisible little black girl that sees all.

Well, of course, my writing has always been about food and that short distance between brain and mouth. Woody Allen says the brain is his “second favorite organ”. I think the mouth might be mine.

Of course, I digress. Back to writing group. We decided our last meeting would be a celebration and that we would have lunch, each of us contributing to the event. I wanted to do something special for my new friends. Something that symbolized our achievements. So I decided that Tagliatelle with Carmelized oranges and almonds was my destiny.

Life was conspiring to keep me from making that dish. A business trip to Texas at the first of the week. A second trip at the end of the week. And long hours and chaos at the office in between.

I made my list. I had decided to serve duck breast with the pasta. You know, a little nod to the traditional Duck L’Orange. My husband Calvin smoked our duck to a perfect smoky pink.

The day of the event I jumped out of bed, James Brown, my sous sampler and Dogfather of Soul, in tow. There was much to do.

The last day is very special. Two of our group read. Powerful stuff. I can tell we have lapsed into that easy-going place in friendships where we can be honest with each other, in a caring, bantering way. There is respect as well as bacon in the air.

It is a day of passions. It’s Valentines Day and we have been shot with arrows meant for Cyrano, Whitman, Conroy, Updike, Sandburg and Prioux. We love the power of words and it has become a magnificent obsession.

I have my first stuffed dates with bacon and almonds. OMG! That’s in my recipe box! Then it’s time for lunch – that lovely orange scented pasta, smoked duck, a fabulous spring green feta salad, warm buttery bread, and wine. And for dessert, a fabulous Paula Deen banana pudding that could be the reason she always seems so slap silly-happy. It matches our mood.

It is a special celebration, a feast for conquering heros (or heroines, as the case may be.) We have killed dragons. Climbed slippery slopes. Exposed our egos and calloused our fingers. And it occurred to me that we were in a better place than any sunny patio in Italy.

We came to the sessions with guilty pleasures and little hobbies. We were afraid to share our writing, let alone read it. But now look at us. We are working on manuscripts. We are talking about re-writes and query letters. We have a goal. Dare we say it? WE ARE WRITERS! Seconds anyone?

Tagliatelle with Caramelized Oranges and Almonds

• Shredded zest of 3 large Valencia or navel oranges
• 8 tablespoons (4 ounces) unsalted butter
• 1-1/2 cups fresh squeezed orange juice
• 2/3 cup sugar
• Generous 1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 6 quarts salted water
• l pound imported dried tagliatelle
• 3 to 4 tablespoons sugar
• l/2 to l teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 2/3 cup (5 ounces) freshly grated Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
• l cup whole blanched almonds, toasted and coarsely chopped

Working Ahead: The sauce can be made several hours ahead, covered and set aside at room temperature. Reheat to bubbling before adding the pasta.

1. Making the Sauce: Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Use a wooden spatula to stir in about l/4 cup of the orange juice and the 2/3 cup of sugar. Melt sugar in the butter over medium heat, stirring in spoonfuls of orange juice frequently to keep the sauce from crystallizing (reserve about l/3 cup orange juice for finishing the sauce).

Once sugar is dissolved, heat can be turned up to medium high or high. Stir occasionally as the mixture bubbles and slowly turns amber. When mixture becomes deep golden amber, stir in the pepper and two-thirds of the orange zest. Cook only a second or two to protect rind from burning. Then step back from the skillet and pour in the last 1/3 cup of orange juice at arm’s length. It will bubble up and possibly spatter, then it will thin the sauce to ideal consistency. Turn off the heat. If making ahead, remove the pan from the heat, cool and cover.

2. Cooking the Pasta: Have a large platter and dinner or dessert dishes warming in a low oven. If serving with the capon, have it ready to serve. Make sure pasta water is at a fierce boil. Drop in the pasta and cook until tender but still resistant to the bite. Drain in a colander. Reheat the sauce to a lively bubble. Add the pasta to the skillet and toss to coat thoroughly. Turn onto the heated platter, and sprinkle with the remaining sugar, cinnamon, cheese, almonds, and lastly, the remaining orange rind. Place the capon atop the pasta and serve. Carve the bird at the table. Spoon a small mound of pasta onto each dinner plate and top it with slices of capon. If serving pasta as a dessert, mound small portions on heated dessert plates and serve hot.