Comfort Food

Toward the end of my junior year of college, my parents’ ugly and complicated divorce caused a lapse in my college tuition payments, and I wasn’t eligible for a dorm room on campus for my senior year. I scrambled to condense my final year into one semester and moved into my boyfriend’s apartment in Boston, becoming part of the tiny fraction of Wellesley students who lived off campus. It was an unceremonious and disorienting launch into adulthood. To pay my share of the rent and bills, I took a job in the bookstore at Trinity Church in Copley Square, working almost full-time between commuting to campus two days a week.

That summer I also signed up to be a tour guide at Trinity. Built in 1877, Trinity is the masterpiece of architect Henry Hobson Richardson and a landmark in the history of American architecture, visited by 100,000 tourists every year. The church had decided that, starting in the fall of 2000, it would start charging visitors for tours. I was in the very first training cohort that would be on the front lines of this sea shift in how the public encountered this magnificent building.

I had written term papers on the church for both my religion major and my art history minor, and I had been trekking into the city for Sunday services at Trinity since early in my first year at Wellesley. Now, as an employee, I was even granted access to parts of the building the public doesn’t normally see. Trinity is in the center of Boston’s Back Bay, which had been a marsh before being filled with dirt over the last half of the 19th century, and the building rests on 4,500 wooden subterranean pilings (the size of telephone poles) that have to remain submerged and preserved in water. In the crypt, I was able to touch parts of the pyramidal granite foundation that rested on these pilings and supported the church’s iconic square tower. 

The church’s basement was also filled with the detritus of more than a century: stacks of surplus roof tiles, the intricately carved altar from the old chapel, rusting iron hardware. (In the recent past the crypt had also been occupied by a cat rumored to harbor the ghost of the church’s most famous rector from the 19th century, Phillips Brooks, but my fellow church staff assured me that the spirit had been exorcized by the time I arrived – still, I never went down there alone.) The director of the tour program dragged out many of the smaller architectural castoff objects for our training, encouraging us to carry them along on our tours so visitors could have a tactile experience of the building’s unique elements.

Our tour guide training sessions took place over several evening sessions, with a themed potluck each week. One week we were supposed to bring a dish that represented our family history, another week something that was common in the region where we grew up. For the grand finale, we were asked to bring our favorite food from childhood. When I called my mom and told her the assignment, she simply said, “I’ll go get the recipe,” without having to ask what it was.

When I was growing up, I got to select the menu for my birthday dinner, and every year it was exactly the same. Homemade macaroni and cheese, with canned green beans and boiled carrots on the side (even on special occasions, my mom required vegetables), followed by a Duncan Hines chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. Though my family ate Sunday night dinners at a local restaurant and frequented Long John Silver’s, Pizza Hut, and Western Sizzler when my mom didn’t feel like cooking, birthdays were not for eating out – they required the comforts of home, which were far better than anything a restaurant could provide.

Within a few days, a copy of the macaroni and cheese recipe in my mom’s handwriting arrived in the mail, and that week I headed to Star Market to get the ingredients. While the recipe is not terribly complicated, I could see why my mom only made it a couple times a year between birthdays – it was definitely more intensive than heating up pasta sauce or getting Chinese takeout. This was also my first time making it on my own, trying to fill my mom’s shoes. I had to buy an aluminum casserole pan at the grocery store, and I didn’t have a whisk to properly blend the flour and butter to make the white sauce. But it tasted like my childhood, if a little lumpier than what I remembered.

Two decades later, I have made this casserole hundreds of times. I’ve tried versions with fancy cheeses, but I still prefer the original cheddar. These days, I make a gluten-free variation. By now I have the recipe memorized, but I still have that old copy framed on my kitchen wall. It sports evidence of one of my rookie mistakes: setting the paper recipe card down on the still-hot coil of the electric stove.

Whenever I see those brown scorch marks, they transport me back to that first apartment and remind me what a novice I was at everything, not just cooking: paying bills, being in a relationship, speaking to groups of people. I’m also reminded that, for everything I was still figuring out, there was a lot that has lasted. Next November, that boyfriend and I will celebrate our twentieth wedding anniversary. I’ve now been an Episcopal priest for over a decade, and though I’ve never again worked in another church as grand as Trinity, talking to people about spiritual matters has been my full-time occupation for quite a while now.

For that year, as the foundations of my world crumbled, I got to spend my days in a building that had been floating in the Back Bay for almost 125 years, drawing tourists’ attention to the sturdy stone columns, the antique stained glass portraying ancient stories, the pews that had supported generations of churchgoers. When plans for my last year of college evaporated in an instant, I filled a tote bag with terracotta tiles and old iron hinges, feeling their heft anchoring me. Through it all, I kept pulling out my mom’s recipe. My nuclear family as I knew it was gone for good, but as I stirred together butter and milk and noodles and cheese, I discovered that I could still conjure up the taste of all the birthday dinners we had celebrated around the table together.