Crappy Spaghetti
On the intensely personal nature of food
When my parents divorced, my mother became a single working mom in charge of feeding a picky 11-year-old after a long day of work. She was no great cook, so this was a challenge. I don't remember meals much as a kid, except a singular meal where I was introduced to some kind of grilled meat that I loved so much I had five helpings, shocking my parents. That, and her beef stew and chicken soup. Those were the two most nourishing and amazing meals she cooked, but other than that... cooking was not her forte. She was a woman with many amazing and formidable skills, but food prep was not in her repertoire.
When it was just her and I, meals became more of a challenge. She was tired at the end of a long day and needed something fast. At some point, she came up with this shortcut version of pasta. It’s not the version pictured above; frankly, I needed a picture and when I searched for “crappy spaghetti, the results were just too terrifying.
Here's the rough recipe: We’d start by boiling Creamette brand angel hair pasta. Then, we'd open a can of whole peeled tomatoes and, after rinsing the pasta, we'd dump the juices from the tomatoes into the pot with the noodles—not the tomatoes themselves, mind you. Just the thin, watery tomato juice. Then we'd reheat the whole thing, adding garlic powder, salt, and pepper. To top it off, we'd serve with the Kraft parmesan cheese, the kind that came from the round tub and was shelf-stable for an eye-brow-raising amount of time.
It was delicious.
She's come dragging home and ask, "Spaghetti?" And I would enthusiastically answer "YES." I always had my noodles with a cold glass of 2% milk. The combination was amazing to me
As an adult, I can now see that our diet was atrocious. Few veggies, and very little meat. And, having dealt with the many realities of living with low serotonin, I now understand why we were always chasing the carb-binge. But this was the early 90s—no one talked about this back then.
So we ate our pasta. In my teenage years, I was able to cook it for her before she got home, that and pizza. I think we ate some kind of pasta dish at least twice a week, and that might be a really modest estimation so no one gets embarrassed. It was the soothing balm at the end of a long day.
When I went to college, I started making it on my own more and more often. I once made it for my college boyfriend, Matt. I sold it hard, saying things like this is the best pasta and yada yada, and when it came time to eat it... he kind of gagged a little. "What is this?" he asked like I'd fed him something truly terrible. I was completely shocked...how could he not love this pasta? He said he never wanted to eat it again.
I was understandably gun-shy about sharing that pasta with anyone after that.
Years later my mom had a stroke. I would come home and make it for her, and she and I would dig in. My stepdad played along, but I don't think it was his favorite. He knew it was ours and respected that. By that point I had taken to calling it "crappy spaghetti" because I was well aware of the lack of nutrients in our favorite dish, and that there were other, more healthy or palatable versions to be had. We didn't care. It was still soothing.
When my mom passed away, it was up to my stepdad and I to handle the details. I had to sit with the priest at the church where her service was to be held and go through the mass and the burial would unfold. At some point, Tom had to step outside and answer a phone call, or attend to some other detail. The main priest left too, leaving me with the young priest-in-training to ask questions. He said "How has this been for you?" And, given this was only a few days after her passing, I was not okay but holding it together. I babbled. I have no idea what I said, except that I remember talking about our crappy spaghetti and how we both loved it so much, and then wondering why the hell I was babbling about this at all while the words were coming out of my mouth, and specifically about this meal that no one else seemed to like as much as we did. It's a memory that's fuzzed over, but it ended as well as a conversation about a funeral for your mother can end.
The day of the funeral is a blur. There are only a few memories that stand out strongly, the strongest being the moment the young priest-in-training took to the podium to deliver the sermon. I was in the front row with my stepdad to my left and my uncle to my right. His sermon was about the endurance of love and how it continues after death. I was exhausted by that point so I know there was a fair amount of spacing out, but I do remember this. At the end of his speech, he said "Love is like the perfect plate of crappy spaghetti, with tomato juice and cheese on top" and he looked right at me and smiled. I struggled to keep myself from busting out laughing; first, because he said "crappy spaghetti" at my mother's funeral; second because laughing at a funeral is wildly inappropriate; third because laughing at your mother's funeral seems especially macabre. Everyone else looked around in confusion.
Afterwards, some of us went out to dinner, including my uncle and my cousins. The topic of the random comment about spaghetti came up, and before I could explain the context, my cousin told this story. Once, my mom came and visited them in Plano, Texas, where they live. Mom volunteered to cook one night, claiming she had come up with this delicious new spaghetti recipe. She was so excited to cook it for them. When she did, my cousins couldn't eat it. They thought it was that terrible—they couldn't even fake it. "I didn't eat pasta for a month after that," one of them told me.
This was my beloved crappy spaghetti. It scarred my cousin so badly that she didn't eat pasta for a month afterward. That's saying something.
This just goes to show how intensely personal food can be. What nourishes our souls might not nourish someone else's soul. What tastes good to one person, scars someone else for life (ha!). But it doesn't make the enjoyment of it any less valid. It's been years since I've made crappy spaghetti. Turns out I'm gluten and dairy-intolerant—go figure—so I've had to alter the way I eat pasta. But it's still a functional staple in our household, and I think of my mother every time I make it. The memories, if not the actual food itself, still nourish my connection with her.
Postscript: After a healing session last year, my shamanic teacher told me my mother, who had passed 11 years prior, had suddenly appeared during our session. I had told him very little about our life together, and certainly nothing about her cooking. She assertively claimed she was a good cook, and then laughed because I can no longer eat crappy spaghetti, regardless. Stunned was one way to describe my reaction to her message. But then my next thought was: Oh shit, has she been hearing me talk about her terrible cooking all this time?