Not since the Eggplant Lasagna War of 2012 has my family been so divided. But that has now faded into the distant past as the Great Hardboiled Egg Lasagna Debacle of 2016 has overtaken it both in terms of vehemence and hysteria.
It all started with my sister’s request that I make lasagna for Sunday dinner at Cousin Joe’s house. That would be cousin Joe Jr. as opposed to Joe 3, or Joseph the progenitor of all that followed, or cousin Joe from New York, or any other of the multitudinous Joe’s in our family. You see, we are a family of tradition. In every generation it is required that there be multiple Joe’s and an equal number of Marina’s, all named after the first immigrants who set foot on these shores from the old country. Along with the names, we inherited the recipes.
On this particular Sunday, as the lasagna was served, first murmurs, then gasps, then cries of horror emanated from the crowd as they discovered the slices of hardboiled eggs in the dish. The debate raged on all afternoon. My sister valiantly defended her choice as being a Sicilian version of the iconic dish. My cousin Marina called her daughter who is a chef on the West Coast to get confirmation that this was a legitimate add on. Despite the chef’s agreement, it was still felt that since we are not from Sicily, the dish was suspect. Plus the chef’s still a kid so what did she know?
Young children gingerly picked the egg out of their portion under the watchful eyes of parents who wanted to be sure their understanding of lasagna was not tainted. Others murmured under their breaths that everyone knew that if you wanted more protein in your lasagna, you made it with meat sauce. But with eggs? Truly an abomination.
This debate carried on through the main meal and well into dessert. The chemistry and biology of a lasagna was dissected minutely and never once was any member of the family able to come up with justification for changing what had been handed down to us. It was finally agreed that I’d had a momentary stroke but was recovering and would some day be cleansed enough to rejoin the family circle. Judy, being the perennial baby of the family, was absolved from all wrongdoing despite the fact that it was her idea in the first place.
That, my dear reader, is what my family is all about. Laughing. Loving. Eating. Arguing. Being together as a group that supports each other even when someone introduces hardboiled eggs into the mix. And this is why Les Gara fights so hard to get foster kids into stable homes where they can be part of a family. Because no group can replace what family brings to the table in terms of love, support andsomeone to pick you up when you have a flat tire at 1 AM in the middle of Lincoln Drive. Or someone to point out when you’ve made an abomination of a treasured family recipe.
So many kids in the foster care system dream of the perfect family they were taken from. We know those families weren’t perfect and we know those childhood memories can be very self-editing. You only remember the good times because the bad are simply too painful. But you also remember those good times because inside all of us is an overwhelming desire to belong to someone, somewhere who will expect us for the Sunday family meal after church or just assume we’ll be showing up with Nona’s sweetbread to the summer cookouts. We want to belong to a group in which we are accepted and embraced, in which we can laugh and talk and visit and know that every person in that room would surround us with support and protection if needed. They would always have our backs.
Foster kids not only deserve this, they need it to grow up and out of the system with a model of a healthy family in which they participated. If we can’t provide that to them, then two things happen. One is that child will never know if lasagna should have hardboiled eggs or not. And two, that child will be adrift and anchorless through their formative years and that’s a surefire recipe for losing them in the future.