This story is about lasagna but it is also about my dear late Uncle Frank and the memories that dishes carry.

Lasagna and last meals

By Jen Curcio

A few weeks ago I was lying in bed when a memory from my childhood resurfaced. Many years ago, when I was about 10 years old, my uncle Frank was visiting us in Melbourne. He and my aunty Rosina (my father’s sister) had come down from Warrnambool – a city along Victoria’s Great Ocean Road. They’d lived in country Victoria since the 50s when my aunt had first arrived in Australia, not long after marrying uncle Frank by proxy from Calabria in southern Italy. Visiting Melbourne wasn’t unusual for the two of them, but this occasion felt like an important visit. He was booked in for a heart bypass.

The memory that came to me was a specific evening during their stay. It was a Saturday night, and his operation was that coming Monday. My sister and I had gone to bed and back then unless we needed the bathroom, we had to stay in our bedrooms. Me, ever inquisitive and quietly defiant, hated this rule and often tiptoed out, going as close to the kitchen door as possible without being discovered, entertaining myself with the adult conversation.

Meals in our house were always a celebration in and of themselves, but even more so when we had guests. Dinner that night was another extraordinary effort by my mother who had laboriously put together her lasagna. Mum’s lasagna is famous in our personal circles with both family and friends. People whisper about it and ask questions while and after they’re eating it. What did you put in the besciamella, how long do you bake it for, which meats did you use in the sauce – as though there was a witchcraft to it. To celebrate my first communion, she self-catered a party at our home afterwards and made enough lasagna to serve 50 guests (an industrial oven was bought for the occasion…but that is a story for another time), she gifted a tray of it to the family of a friend of mine who was having a brain operation – his mother still talks about that lasagna, and it’s been the top requested dish and highlight of countless family birthdays and celebrations since I was a child. Mum makes a rich Bolognese sauce, and is generous and excessive with her layers. Plenty of everything from heavily dusted Parmigiano to the creamy besciamella sauce, so thick when baked that you could stick candles in it (btw, I love the idea of a lasagna birthday cake!).

That night after the lasagna had been eaten and my sister and I had ‘gone to bed’, the dinner party for four continued. Wine was drunk, my uncle was telling his usual jokes, and from the sharp but tiny clink of glasses my keen and well practiced ears could tell (now hiding from my bedroom door which was ajar), that the conversation was being accompanied by little shot glasses of liqueur. Beneath the clinks, there was also the clatter of plates and cutlery being collected and stacked to be washed later, the scraping of chairs being moved around, and then a large thud followed by a scream – unmistakably coming from my Aunt.

What followed was painful to hear and recount, and many times over I’ve wished I wasn’t such a night owl and had been fast asleep like a normal 10 year old. But I was awake and therefore like a reflex, the scream propelled me further into my bedroom but I was so stunned I was not able to close the door and I heard everything. It’s at these times your heart sinks, and in my case, it sank into my lasagna filled belly. All you can hear in your mind and core is ‘no this cannot be happening’.

There was my mother shouting for someone to call an ambulance. There was panic, so much movement and an aural blur. After someone (because I cannot remember who) called the ambulance, I can tell you that nothing has ever felt longer than their arrival (and I’ve flown 27 hours from Germany to Australia with two young children). My father and aunt joined the ambulance crew as my uncle was taken to the same hospital he was due to have his bypass on the Monday…a terrible irony.

That night felt endless, and I barely slept, mainly because I’d put in a Guinness World Record attempt at praying for my uncle’s life to be saved. I also remember looking at my younger sister and wishing that I too had been asleep like her so I could have avoided being awake to overhear something I shouldn’t have.

At dawn my father and aunt returned. My mother was asleep and the house was so quiet. It was the start of a new day and I could see the soft sunlight seep into the hall from our frosted glass front doors. Such a lovely morning couldn’t bring terrible tidings could it? My dad and aunt came alone because my uncle was just recovering or in ICU, surely. But when I heard my aunt phone a funeral home, time stopped again. I realised that the sun shining didn’t stop bad things from happening. I also knew my Guiness World Record attempt had failed and I would never see Uncle Frank again. Needless to say, this event impacted me deeply. It was such a shock and a confronting lesson of life’s fragility and how quickly things can change in a moment while drinking liqueur or tidying up the dishes or spying on adults.

My grandparents lived in Italy, so in lieu of my nonni, this particular uncle, who was the same age as them, had been like a nonno to me. He was a prisoner of war who had lived a colourful but hard life and he was armed with so many stories. He loved to fish and hunt and once skinned a rabbit and dried it so I could keep it as a soft mini rug of sorts (at my request), that is until it started smelling quite strange and my parents forced me to toss it in the bin. He drove the coolest chocolate coloured Holden Kingswood, he was sweet and always had time to play or entertain us – he loved my sisters and I like we were his own.

Fast forward 30 or so years and what struck me so intently in that moment all those weeks ago, was realising that that meal was his last. Mum’s lasagna had been prepared many times, but never for this kind of life-changing moment. When I asked my mother about that night she told me that she’d had a strange feeling, that she felt she had to make the lasagna, an urgency. To be honest, I am sure my mother has felt an urgency to cook many meals before. Perhaps an external pressure to create something special and memorable, she is a nurturing Italian mother after all. But this was more like a premonition and like many Italians mothers are most of the time, she was right.

This realisation, decades after the fact, shocked me so much because it changed the way I had viewed food. I knew it ignited memories, can transport us to places, and can resurrect people. I also knew that food has a legacy but that it also carries a weight – stories and feelings, often joy but sometimes also pain but in this case, a kind of honour. My Mum unknowingly made a great man his final meal. Would this have been the dish that Uncle Frank would have chosen? Would he have been happy Mum’s lasagna was his last meal? I have a hunch he would have been.

Now when I look at a dish or a recipe, whether it’s lasagna or not, I have another layer to view it by.

Have you ever cooked someone their final meal? Let me know.