Casserole

Sarah Boisjoli

I was born in Montreal but moved to the southwest United States when I was five.

My mother married a military brat who’d grown up as an only child in Texas with his eccentric mother so that’s where we went. They had a tex-mex wedding and to this day I still feel like nachos with chili con carne are totally reasonable wedding food. We grew chiles in our backyard and I loved to pick the habaneros and jalapeños from their plants and see how much heat I could take. Sometimes on Sundays, we’d drive just outside of our Austin suburb to a trailer that sold barbecue. We’d load up on brisket and beef ribs, cole slaw and pecan pies. My mom, who is a painter, kept a studio in Austin and one of our favorite restaurants was just around the corner. The Korea House was where I first had sushi (one of the owners was Japanese and the other Korean) and Korean barbecue. I loved to pop salmon roe between my teeth and compete with my sister over who could eat the most wasabi without crying. I was probably six years old at the time. When we’d fly back up to Montreal over the summers to see my dad we couldn’t get to a poutine and a meal at the old school rotisserie joint, Laurier BBQ, fast enough. We’d share a “poitrine” (chicken breast) and a “hot chicken” (chicken sandwich covered in chicken gravy and peas) which I am told is delicious only to French Canadians and is actually quite disgusting to anyone else. We’d visit my French grandmother in NDG and she’d feed us croissants and nutella and St. Viateur bagels, all of which were hard or impossible to come by in Austin, Texas at the time. We’d watch reverently as she would expertly prepare fish in her French oval fish kettle decorated in blue and red and orange enamel that I still covet today. We left Texas and moved on to New Mexico where barbecue and tex-mex culture was replaced with chile culture: green or red or Christmas? In New Mexico I had my first pozole and the burritos from Felipe’s on Airport Road are still the best in the world and worthy of a special trip.

Eventually my mother and the Texan got divorced and a little while later she got remarried this time to a North-easterner from Trumansburg, New York. His grandmother, Grandma Martha was the matriarch who had come to that area of upstate New York and founded Perry City (the town just over from Trumansburg) with her husband and a couple of other relatives. His mother was the town historian and one of the many Daughter’s of the Revolution. His father was a farmer and a freemason. He had a bunch of siblings and literally hundreds of first, second and third cousins, uncles, aunts and then some relatives that I think got grandfathered in somehow but weren’t actually related.  They were farmers and truck drivers and bluegrass musicians. Hearing about them felt like reading about George Washington cutting down the apple tree or Paul Revere on his midnight ride: deeply, unabashedly and purely American. I’d never been a part of such a big family and I’d never really been indoctrinated into American culture. Texas was unofficially its own country after all. We still lived on the other side of the country in the Southwest, then on to Southern California, then to Florida and back to the Southwest so get togethers with the American-As-Apple-Pie (which I think is actually super French btw) were somewhat infrequent, so I remained a bit of an alien to their traditions and way of life (a fact reinforced by my green card and visits to INS.) 

When I was eighteen, I moved to New York City.

Despite it being situated far away from my Southwestern comfort zone, the city’s diversity made me feel more at home than I had felt anywhere else I’d ever lived. That year my parents decided to come up and join my step-dad’s family for Thanksgiving. I would take the train to Albany and they’d pick me up and we’d have a veritable All-American Thanksgiving with the family. I was skeptical but game. Although we were kind of cultural mutts, Frenchies who descended from a Native American tribe and who preferred enchiladas to cheeseburgers, we’d always celebrated Thanksgiving. Aside from our immediate family, we mostly flew solo: a small table of four to six of us having some food together and laughing about the semi-irony of the occasion being celebrated by First Nation Canadians (there were a lot of “you’re welcomes” getting thrown around at the table). Admittedly, we were mostly winging it food wise and always throwing green chile where it didn’t belong (a practice I continue today with soups, pancakes, coffee, ice cream etc etc etc). One year in New Mexico Thanksgiving dinner was a big pot of turkey pozole, a year in Florida there were crab legs, several years were dedicated to my mother’s fascination with spaghetti squash ice cream. Over time we incorporated more and more traditional staples: fresh cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, stuffing, even turkeys without green chile. One year my step-dad requested pearl onions in some kind of white sauce with peas and cranberry sauce from a can and since then my mother has skeptically obliged and they’ve been a fixture on the table despite him being the only partaker. I assumed this epic upstate family Thanksgiving dinner would be similar, probably more onions in sauce, but similar. 

I was wrong.

We got to some second-cousin’s-thrice-removed’s home deep in the woods and everything appeared quite normal at first. Frying ones turkey was all the rage that year so that didn’t freak me out. No green chile but I could hang. We walked in through the living room (to avoid the high-pitched squawking genetic to the female members of the Dickson clan taking place in the kitchen) and got comfortable with some French onion dip and Ruffles while we waited to get called in for dinner. Still no red flags. After all, the dip was French y’all. Conversation was dominated by the usual football rivalries and barely restrained anticipation of the annual Thanksgiving rendition of the Rhinestone Cowboy. What was happening in the kitchen remained a complete mystery. 

When dinner was announced I don’t think either my mother or I were prepared for the actual stampede that took place. The fifteen or so people peacefully convened in the living room in seconds became closer to forty or fifty. Kids I didn’t even know were in attendance jostled and fought for their places in line. Someone knocked Grandma Martha’s ubiquitous Southern Comfort Manhattan to the ground eliciting a rare curse from the victim. The hollers and screeches of excitement were bordering on deafening. This kind of reaction, I thought, meant the food must be amazing. My hungry and sleep deprived mind conjured images of perfectly whipped piles of mashed potatoes, jewel-toned fresh cranberry sauce catching the light. beautifully caramelized Brussel’s sprouts all to accompany a golden, crispy skinned turkey. 

I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking. What greeted me was not the Martha Stewart worthy spread I’d hoped for. Instead, a seemingly endless assortment of casseroles that all looked more or less the same. If there was a turkey, I couldn’t identify it.

I’d spent the majority of my life in the US and had thus far successfully avoided “the casserole” even during such American traditions as Thanksgiving. I didn’t get it, on a fundamental level. I was wholly uninitiated, unprepared and freaked the fuck out. I looked in panic at my mother.  We shuffled down the line, mostly forced on our way by the angry mob forming in lieu of our having been totally stalled out, scooping one nondescript or unidentifiable spoonful of casserole onto our plates after the other. She’d nudge me and point discreetly at a thing with a question in her eyes “What the fuck is that?”. No clue. I thought I identified one with what looked like fried onions on top correctly; surely this must be the infamous Green Been Casserole. I dipped the serving spoon in with momentary confidence, and came up with a spoon of grey matter. The operative word in Green Bean being “green” I thought. Quite apparently not. I’d amassed five maybe six (how could one be sure really?) scoops of casserole and went to go for a seventh. This one, whatever it was, fought back. The serving spoon went in, and never came back out. It was reddish in color, beets maybe? I’d never find out. Sitting down and actually eating the casseroles didn't seem to help much in terms of identifying what was what. Colors didn’t confirm flavors didn’t confirm textures. What kind of witchcraft was this exactly? I left hungry and more then ready to head back to the city where almost everything I ate from hot dogs at Papaya Dogs to oysters at Balthazar had form at the very least, and flavor more often then not. I left that dinner with more questions than answers paramount among them being: America, what the fuck is in your casseroles?