Nom-Able

If you looked at my family cookbook–not this project version, but the actual cookbook, as discussed in the Consumate Chocolate Cookie Recipe, you’d mostly find bits and pieces of packaging taped to the pages. Cardboard ripped off of boxes, bits of plastic from bags of chips and noodles, and various assorted substances can be found crammed into metal boxes and a tattered, batter-splattered, copy of the first edition Better Homes & Gardens New Cookbook, whose pages now stick together and tear apart in thin yellow strips.

This recipe was always known to me as Grandma Coy’s Tuna Cassarole. It made sense: it had tuna, it was a cassarole, it was the kind of food my paternal grandmother would have made. It was only years later, when David and I moved out of my parents house that I found out that my grandmother wasn’t the brilliant cook I thought she was. We moved to England in 2005, and I decided to share a traditional, Southern recipe with my future in-laws in England, but I had never learned how to make my favorite dish.

I emailed my father, but he could not remember his mother making it, so he asked my mother instead. That night, she called me on the phone and laughed in my face as she explained that it was not, in fact, an old Southern family recipe. Oh no, it was her grandmother’s recipe–that she got off the back of a San Giorgio box.

Well shit.

Strangely, the original recipe isn’t a tuna cassarole; it’s called “Seashells in the Sunset” — yet it features no shells to speak of. The original calls for macaroni noodles, salmon, and pimientos, but you’ll find none of those in my mother’s version of my great-grandmother’s favorite stolen recipe.

This recipe is the one I made. Good luck finding the original — much googling resulted in mostly amature photography of seashells on a beach in the sunset. Oh well.

Seashells in the Sunset / Tuna Cassarole

• 8 oz. (1/2 pkg.) large pasta shells
• 1/4 c. butter
• 1/4 c. minced onion
• 1/3 c. flour
• 3 c. milk
• 1 tsp. salt
• Dash each nutmeg and pepper
• 1 c. shredded extra sharp white cheddar cheese
• 1 c. shredded monteray jack cheese (colby jack works too)
• 1-2 small cans (depending on taste. I use one) white tuna packed in water
• 1/4 c. fresh chopped parsley
• 3 tbsp. butter
• 1/2 c. Italian bread crumbs

1. Cook macaroni in boiling salted water as package directs until tender. Drain.
2. Meanwhile melt butter in a saucepan. Add onion, saute 5 minutes. Add flour; cook, stirring constantly for a moment or two. Add milk and continue to stir until mixture comes to a slow boil and thickens. Season sauce with nutmeg and pepper. Add cheese, pimiento, salmon and parsley.
3. Turn shells into a buttered 2 quart casserole and cover with the cheese sauce. Melt remaining butter and toss with crumbs, sprinkle liberally over casserole. Bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for 25 minutes.