This special edition of the Sunday Story comes from the Dining column in our September issue.
Illustration by Rachel Maves
My father loved to cook, but he didn’t do it often. After he and my mother divorced, he did it more frequently, but only because he had to. In the house he had decamped to on Sugarloaf Mountain, we would hang out in the barely furnished living room, playing Dragon Warrior on NES and ordering in pizza. Every so often, he would dabble. I remember him taking me into the kitchen once to watch him make a stir-fry, showing me how to make a slurry of cornstarch and chicken stock long before I ever knew what a slurry was. When he swirled it into the hot pan to make a silky, soy-flavored sauce, it seemed like a kind of alchemy.
There was one dish that required no tinkering — a staple of his repertoire that I encountered as soon as I started solid food, long before my food memories began.
This was his signature dish, Dad’s Special Spaghetti, a massive tangle of noodles saturated with the kind of rich sauce that leaves an orange-red goatee around your mouth. Throughout my childhood, it was one of the few dishes Dad would make just for me, and this made it a delicacy.
The recipe’s origins are unclear, likely due to my father’s spotty, at times selective, memory. My mother says he brought it with him to their relationship, which began in 1980. My stepmother, Ginger, says he told her the dish was his mother’s. (My grandmother, according to this version of the story, would serve it alongside flounder once a week or so, an inexpensive meal for a cash-strapped, widowed mother of two).
After my father remarried, he grew a garden in the backyard of Ginger’s childhood home. The tomatoes, peppers and fresh basil provided the ingredients for a new sauce — a pulpy, hearty gravy that took all day to cook. He would serve it in a proud scoop on a bed of angel hair pasta, adorned with a neat, fluffy drift of Kraft parmesan cheese.
But that wasn't Dad’s Special Spaghetti. That’s something of an entirely different order. A different dish altogether.
Dad’s Special Spaghetti is an unapologetically humble concoction: Campbell’s tomato soup, a stick of butter and a pinch of dry basil.
Nothing foodie about it. Nothing effortful.
You cook a box of Mueller’s spaghetti and mix in the soup and butter after you drain the noodles.
I never realized just how unappetizing it might seem until I made it one night for my intensely skeptical roommates in college.
This was the meal I’d get whenever I was sick. Or sad. Or stuck in the house on a rainy day.
Never made in anything but 1-pound increments and never served with so much as a side dish.
And it never failed me. I always pushed back from a plate of it feeling full and satisfied, like a good conversation with an old friend.
Dad’s Special Spaghetti was always just there for me, whenever I needed it. Creamy, tangy, buttery and dependable.
And then, in March, my father passed away.
I was desperate to find him in the world around me, some evidence that he had been here. I sat in his chairs — his beat-up old desk chair, the leather recliner where he played backgammon on his iPad every night, the front seat of his Subaru Outback. But nothing. I ran my hands along his ties — there must have been at least 50 of them in his closet — trying to catch the scent of him, just home from the office. But it eluded me.
I longed for a plate of Dad’s Special Spaghetti, something tangible to connect me to his memory and comfort me. An edible Kaddish.
And so one night recently I decided to whip up a plate, not just for myself but also for my 5-year-old daughter, Lily — his granddaughter, my link to the future.
The creamy sauce, rich with butter, twirled into a tower of pasta — I felt sure she not only would love it, but would also take on the mantle of extending the life of this dish for another generation.
Having long since passed the need for something so quick and cheap and nostalgic, I hadn’t made the dish in nearly 15 years. We sat across from each other at the little table in our Florida room, two heaping plates of pasta in front of us, no side dishes to be seen.
The first slurp sent a jet of sauce onto her chin, and a smile spread across her lips. “THIS IS SO CREAMY AND DELICIOUS!” she shouted.
“This is Dad’s Special Spaghetti,” I told her. “Poppy used to make it for me when I was your age.”
That got her attention, and she eagerly wolfed down two more bites. But she is nothing if not a fickle kid, and a few bites later she pushed the plate forward, declaring it, in fact, too creamy and asking for something else.
And that’s when I realized that I was barely enjoying my own serving and that I would rather eat something else, too.
The sauce, which on first bite was poignant in its sharpness, quickly became cloying — too thick, or “gloopy,” as Lily later called it, breaking my heart just a little.
I pushed the rest of my mound of pasta into the trash bin and fished out a tub of cottage cheese from the fridge, scooping it into a bowl with a hastily sliced tomato. Dinner, take two. Lily contented herself with a crusty slice of toast with cheese, the spaghetti now a distant memory, as she excused herself from the table and ran outside to play.
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