anchored by meat, noodles & cheese

My family stopped making lasagna for Christmas Eve after my grandpa died. I think it’s time to bring it back.

For the first nineteen years of my life, every Christmas Eve began with semolina under my fingernails and ended at my grandparents’ house with a bubbling lasagna in tow.

We clung to this tradition, no matter the chaos in our lives. On the Christmas Eve that my dad had his first surgery following his cancer diagnosis, we made lasagna the day before so we could all eat it together. So that we could pretend like things were as they’d always been.

When Pop died in 2022, the rhythm we had followed for so many years ended with him.

This rhythm placed Pop at the helm of the kitchen, my brother Lukas and I standing on either side of him. We dug wells in the mixture of semolina and flour and cracked egg yolks in the center, mixing the dough until it turned the color of a flame.

We would share the kitchen with Nanny, who always claimed responsibility for making sure our stomachs would be full by the end of the day. Fennel seeds popped in sausage grease, and last summer’s frozen tomatoes were brought to life again as they stewed with basil and chicken stock. The roaring of the hand blender was quickly followed by Nanny’s hand guiding a spoon into my mouth to taste the acidic haze of summer.

What the countertops looked like every Christmas Eve. Photo by Nanny.

Before it was Lukas and I helping Pop make the noodles, my mom and her brothers took on the measuring, rolling and kneading duties. Christmas Eve lasagna is a tradition that goes back over fifty years in my family. When my grandparents moved from Colorado to Oregon, they made sure to pack the pasta roller, drying rack and Pasta Tecnica, the only cookbook we ever really referred to come December.

If you were to lay out the egg-yolk-stained cookbook, you’d find that it naturally opens to the page with the semolina noodle recipe due to how often we’ve followed it. We always used the book, even though Pop had been making these noodles for so many years, I’m certain he could’ve done it from memory. He was a scientist who believed in being meticulous as much as he believed in God. 

Pop & I in front of our lasagna; ignore my middle school fashion sense. Photo by Nanny.

The last time we made lasagna, I discovered that Pop had been writing notes in the margins. The entries dated back to 2008, when I was five years old. He begins some notes with “Hi Maya and Lukas…” Others start simply with the date and instructions on how many eggs to use in the future.

To some, these footnotes may just look like the inner workings of a man who needed a place to put down his thoughts. But I saw it for what it was: Pop was telling us how to keep going even if he was no longer there to physically guide us.

After the note caught my eye, I stopped flattening the pasta as it was halfway through the extruder. I held back tears by biting the inside of my cheek.

“Come on, My,” Pop said, interrupting my thoughts. “Keep turning the crank. Show off your muscles.”    

The notes he left in the margins. Photo by Nanny.

Losing Pop came with grief that can’t be ignored. We’ve tried on occasion to create a new tradition, but no heaping pile of dungeness crab will make me feel at ease like the corner piece of lasagna, where the mozzarella is all crispy on the edge. Those layers of ground pork and homemade ricotta packed between noodles and sauce were the anchors of my childhood. It was proof that we made it through another year.

While Pop is no longer here to tell me when I need to add more cold water to the dough, I have the notes he wrote to my brother and me. It’s close to something of the permission we need to continue the tradition he started.

I know bringing back lasagna on Christmas Eve won’t bring back Pop sitting at the dining table, humming and scraping his fork in delight. But if I squint my eyes hard enough, I can feel my hands working against gritty semolina. I can hear his voice telling me to keep the crank moving; to believe I was strong enough to follow through.

I still feel the love of a man who left notes in the margins, a man who believed that a future he had crafted would exist long after he was gone.

Christmastime 2010. She already knew how to make noodles by heart. Photo by my mom.