Comfort Food

I love tuna, always have. It’s the one thing I could eat everyday and not get sick of it. Nothing is more reliable – you know what you’re going to get every time you open a can.

Some decades ago tuna was something of a rarity in the kibbutz. They had a few tiny cans of it in the store, but you needed protekzia to buy them. I was fairly new then and I remember waiting hopefully at the counter while the shop clerk asked the Lady-In-Charge if I could be permitted to buy one. She looked around the corner to see who had the temerity to ask for it. “No.” This was my first actual encounter with Stalinism.

Those days are thankfully gone. Today I am allowed to buy all the tuna I can hold. So I decided the other day to attempt to recreate my favorite dish from childhood, the staple of Middle America, tuna casserole. My mother, of blessed memory, had many sterling qualities, but cooking skill was not among them. Tuna casserole was the one thing she could make well.

I couldn’t exactly recreate the dish. Sadly, there is no Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup in Israel – why doesn’t Campbell export? – and the kibbutz store doesn’t have egg noodles. I had to improvise with real mushrooms, sour cream and pasta shells. Topped with buttered bread crumbs and baked in the fine baking dish my step-daughter gave me as a house-warming gift, it turned out pretty well. In any case, the taste of tuna, mushrooms and pasta was enough to time-warp me back home. Sometimes, nostalgia can be very comforting.