Covered Dish
Every September at the Callow Grange harvest supper there is one casserole on the long table that nobody brought.
You’d think in a town of four hundred people, where everyone knows everyone’s dishes, that would be hard to miss, and you’d be right. It’s never hard to miss. It’s always in a plain glass baking dish, nine by thirteen, covered in foil, and there’s a strip of masking tape on the foil with a family’s last name written on it in black marker, block capitals. It shows up between the time we unlock the hall at four and the time the doors open at five. Nobody sees it come in. Nobody has ever seen it come in. There’s always somebody in that kitchen from four on, usually me.
I’ve been secretary of the Callow Grange since 2004. It’s my job to deliver it.
I’ll explain it the way Verna Ostby explained it to me, when she handed me the secretary’s binder twenty-two years ago and said there was one thing in it that wasn’t in the bylaws.
In a small town, when somebody dies, people bring food. You’ve seen it. The doorbell rings for a week and it’s ham and scalloped potatoes and Jell-O salad and lasagna, more than anybody could eat, the freezer full, because when somebody dies there’s nothing else you can do except feed the people who are left. In Callow, the dish on the Grange table is the first one.
It comes a year early.
Verna said it had been showing up since at least the 1930s; there’s a note about it in the minutes from 1938, in the old secretary’s spidery handwriting: Covered dish recvd. Delivered to Pruitt family per custom. And within a year, someone in the household on that strip of tape passes. Not always the oldest. Not always the sick one. But someone. Every single time.
“So what’s the point of delivering it?” I asked her. I was thirty-nine and had just moved up from Salem with my husband, and I thought she was pulling the new girl’s leg.
Verna was eighty-one. She had a face like a walnut. She said, “So they know. So they can have the year.”
The first one I delivered was in 2005. HALVORSEN, on the tape. The Halvorsens had a farm out on the Bluff Road, three generations in one big white house. I drove out on the Sunday after the supper with the dish on the seat beside me, still warm, though it had sat in the Grange fridge overnight. That’s another thing. It’s always warm.
Gail Halvorsen answered the door. She looked at the dish and at my face and she put her hand on the frame. I said what Verna told me to say: “This came for you at the Grange. It’s from all of us.” She took it. She didn’t cry. She said thank you.
Her father-in-law, Walt, died that following August, in his sleep, at eighty-eight. Gail told me later they’d had the best year they’d ever had with him. They took him to the ocean. They let him drive the tractor in the Fourth of July parade even though he wasn’t supposed to anymore. She said the casserole was chicken and wild rice. His late wife’s recipe, exactly. Nobody alive knew how to make it except Gail, and she’d never made it for anyone.
That’s the other thing. It’s always somebody’s recipe. Somebody who’s gone.
I’ve delivered twenty-one dishes. Twenty-one Septembers. I’ve stood on porches all over this valley with that warm glass dish in my hands and watched people’s faces change. A few have been angry. One man, a Mr. Sorensen, threw it into his yard. His son had an accident at the mill that winter. Most people say thank you. Most people, as Verna said, have the year.
There are rules about it, though nobody wrote them down but me. You eat it, together, all of you on the tape, that same week. You wash the dish and you bring it back to the Grange and leave it on the counter in the kitchen, and it’s gone by morning. You don’t throw it out. You don’t give it to the dog. You don’t try to find out who made it.
I tried, once. In 2011 I sat in the Grange kitchen from three in the afternoon on the day of the supper with the door locked, and I didn’t take my eyes off the counter. At 4:52 I stood up to answer the door for the Tollefsons, who were early with their pies, and I was gone for perhaps forty seconds, and when I came back, it was there.
BYERS. Beef stroganoff. Their daughter was nineteen.
I don’t try anymore.
This year’s supper was two weeks ago.
I unlocked the hall at four, as I always do. My granddaughter, Junie, who is fourteen and here for the summer, came with me to help set up the long tables and put out the paper tablecloths. At about 4:40 I sent her out to the truck for the coffee urn, and when I turned around, there it was, on the counter by the sink. A glass dish, foil, a strip of tape.
DUQUETTE.
I’ll be honest: I sat down. There’s a folding chair in that kitchen and I sat in it, and I had a minute. I’m sixty-one. I’m healthy, more or less. My husband Gene is sixty-six and had a stent put in two years ago. My son and his wife and Junie are in Portland. It doesn’t say which Duquette. It never does.
Then Junie came back in with the urn and said, “Grandma, are you okay?”
I said I was fine, and I stood up, and we had the supper, and I served the green bean casserole and laughed with the Tollefsons, and nobody said a word about the dish on the counter with my name on it, though everybody saw it. Not one person. They just touched my shoulder going by.
I took it home. We ate it that Wednesday, Gene and Junie and me, with my son and his wife on a video call from Portland. Gene said a prayer, which he doesn’t usually.
I lifted the foil. It was a tater tot hotdish. Ground beef, cream of mushroom, green beans, the tots in neat rows on top, browned. A Minnesota church-basement standby. Nothing special.
It was mine.
I mean that it was my recipe. My particular version, with the dash of Worcestershire and the cheddar under the tots instead of on top, which is how I’ve made it since I was a young wife. I’ve made it a thousand times. And I’ve never written it down. Junie keeps asking me to, for her, for when she’s grown, and I keep telling her I will.
Taped to the inside of the foil, there was a recipe card. My recipe. In Junie’s handwriting.
Older. Steadier than it is now. Grown-up. On the back it said: Grandma’s. Made it for Grandpa the week after. He ate the whole thing standing up at the counter.
So that’s how it is. I know which Duquette now. I’ve told Gene. I haven’t told Junie, though she’s a sharp girl and I think she knows something, because she hasn’t stopped hugging me since.
I’m not sick. I went to the doctor last week and she said I’m in good shape for my age. That doesn’t mean anything. Walt Halvorsen was in good shape. The Byers girl was nineteen.
I’ve decided to have the year. I’ve started with the binder. There’s a new section in the back now, in my handwriting, with all the rules and the delivery dates and the names, and a page about what to say on the porch, because somebody will have to take it next September. I’ve asked Carol Tollefson. She said yes, then went out to her car and sat for a while.
And I’ve written down the hotdish. I wrote it on a recipe card for Junie, exactly the way I make it: the Worcestershire, the cheddar under the tots. I gave it to her this morning. She read it and folded it in half and put it in her back pocket and went out to the porch and didn’t come in for an hour.
I’d thought maybe if I never wrote it down, it couldn’t happen. That’s a silly idea. I knew it was silly.
I just wanted, for once, to be the one who decided when the recipe got passed on.
The dish is washed. It’s on my counter now, upside down on a dish towel, clean and dry. Tonight I’ll drive it back to the Grange and leave it in the kitchen by the sink, and in the morning it’ll be gone, the way they always are. Waiting, I suppose, for somebody else’s name.