The Casserole That Started A Truce

For twenty years I went to war every October with a woman named Grenwood, and the weapon was a nine by thirteen pan of tater tot hotdish.

I want to say that up front, because if I dress it up as anything grander than what it actually was, a decades long grudge match between two widows over a casserole, I will have lied to you, and I did not come this far in life to start lying to strangers on the internet about tater tots.

My name is Emmerson. I am sixty seven years old, and I have lived my whole life in Haskett, Nebraska, a town of about eleven hundred people sitting where the county road crosses the rail line, close enough to the Platte that in a wet spring you can smell the river clear from the church parking lot. I raised three children in a white farmhouse two miles east of town. I buried my husband, Emberly, six years ago, on a Tuesday in March with the snow still crusted along the fence rows. And for as long as most of Haskett can remember, I have belonged to Trinity Lutheran, in the pew fourth from the back on the left, the one my mother sat in before me.

Every October, Trinity holds the Harvest Potluck. It has been held the third Saturday of October since before I was born, in the same low brick fellowship hall with the same folding tables and the same particular smell of coffee and floor wax that every church basement in Nebraska seems to share, as if the state issues it at the county line. There is a hymn sing, there is a silent auction table for the roof fund, and there is the cook off: seven categories, hotdish being the one that matters, judged by however many dried lima beans the congregation drops into a mason jar behind each entry on the way through the buffet line. Whoever has the most beans by the time the pie comes out gets her name on the little brass plate screwed into the Harvest Potluck trophy, which is, I will tell you honestly, a bowling trophy from 1967 with a plastic sheaf of wheat glued where the bowler used to stand. Nobody has ever explained that to my satisfaction. It is the single most important object in Haskett, Nebraska, and it looks like it came out of a gas station.

For twenty of those Octobers, the name on the little brass plate belonged either to me or to a widow named Grenwood.

Grenwood moved to Haskett the same spring I did, 2004, when both our husbands took jobs six months apart managing grain at the co op elevator on the north edge of town. We should have been friends. We were the same age within a year, we both had three children we were raising on a young family’s budget, and for about four months we were friendly in the ordinary way two new women in a small town are friendly, trading zucchini in August and casserole dishes when somebody had a baby.

Then came the funeral potluck for old Deacon Falkner that October, my first Harvest Potluck season in Haskett, and I brought my mother’s tater tot hotdish, the one with the cream of mushroom and the sharp cheddar and the crushed saltines on top, and Grenwood brought hers, and somebody’s aunt, a woman I did not even know, stood over both pans with a serving spoon and said, loud enough for the whole line to hear, “Well now, isn’t this a coincidence. Two new gals, two identical casseroles. Guess we’ll see who really knows what she’s doing.”

I do not believe that woman meant a thing by it. I believe she was simply an aunt with a big voice and no sense that words land. But Grenwood looked at me across the buffet table, and I looked at Grenwood, and something clicked into place between us the way a trap does, quiet and final, and neither one of us has ever been able to say afterward who set it off first.

What I can tell you is that by the following October, we had each, independently, without a word of discussion, entered the hotdish category, and my dish came in second, and Grenwood’s came in first, by four lima beans, and I went home and did not speak to my husband for the better part of an evening over four beans in a mason jar.

That was the beginning. I am not proud of the twenty years that followed, but I am not entirely ashamed of them either, and I have come to believe you cannot understand the second half of this story without the first half, so I am going to tell you the whole thing, sabotage and all.

The salt and sugar canisters, I confess, were me. This was maybe year three. Grenwood kept her prep station, when we ended up working the fellowship hall kitchen on the same afternoon, organized in identical white canisters with black stenciled letters, SALT and SUGAR, and it took me exactly four seconds to switch the lids while she went to her car for a casserole carrier. I want it on the record that I did not touch the salt or the sugar themselves. I only switched the lids. Grenwood, being a woman who trusted her own kitchen implicitly, poured what she believed was two teaspoons of salt into her hotdish and it was, in fact, two teaspoons of sugar, and I have been told by three separate witnesses that the result was memorable. She did not place that year. She has never once mentioned it to me directly in twenty years, but she has brought her own canisters home in a locked tackle box every single October since, and I consider that a form of acknowledgment.

Grenwood, for her part, was not above retaliation. The year after the salt incident, my good roasting pan, the fourteen inch enamel one that had belonged to my grandmother and that I have used for every hotdish I have made since 1979, went missing from the fellowship hall kitchen the Thursday before the potluck. I searched that kitchen for three hours. I searched the choir robe closet. I searched the nursery, on the theory that somebody’s toddler had wandered off with it, which tells you how far a woman’s logic will travel when her pan is missing. I ended up making my hotdish that year in a rectangular cake pan two inches too shallow, and it came out thin and dry around the edges, and I placed fourth, behind a woman who had entered a broccoli rice casserole she openly admitted came half out of a box. My grandmother’s pan turned up the following Monday, back in its usual cupboard, with a single Post it note stuck to the lid that said, in handwriting I would recognize anywhere by then, “Found this in the choir closet. Odd place for it. G.”

I will tell you plainly, I laughed when I read that note. I was furious, and I laughed, both at once, and I have thought about that a great deal since, because it is not a small thing to laugh at the person you believe you hate.

There were more years like that than I can list without this turning into an inventory. The year Grenwood signed the men’s Wednesday Bible study up to use the fellowship hall kitchen from three to five on potluck prep Saturday, a slot I had held for eleven years running, so that I arrived with my ingredients to find six farmers drinking coffee and discussing the Book of Job at my stove. The year I may or may not have mentioned, in passing, to three different women in the church parking lot, that I had heard somewhere that certain hotdishes in the competition used canned mushroom soup rather than a proper roux, a comment that was not, strictly speaking, aimed at anyone, and that Grenwood nonetheless heard about within the hour, because Haskett, Nebraska has approximately eleven hundred residents and zero secrets. The year she brought a card table and set up directly outside the fellowship hall door, greeting every single person walking in with a small sample cup of her hotdish before they ever reached the buffet line, so that half the congregation had already decided who deserved their lima bean before mine was even unwrapped. I called that one, privately, the Advertising Incident, and I did not speak a full sentence to her for six weeks.

Understand, please, that none of this was cruel, not really, not the way I have heard some families can be cruel to each other. Nobody’s feelings were meant to be crushed. It was mischief dressed up as war, the kind two strong willed widows in a small town invent for themselves because a small town, God bless it, does not offer a woman my age a great deal else to sharpen herself against. My children were grown and gone by then, off in Lincoln and Kearney and one all the way out in Colorado. My husband, in those years, was alive but quiet, a man who loved me steadily and without much drama for forty one years, and there is only so much drama one steady, quiet man can supply a woman who was raised, as I was, by a mother who considered a good feud practically a hobby. Grenwood filled a hole I did not know I had. I would not have said so at the time. I would have said, if you had asked me across that buffet table any October between 2005 and 2024, that I could not stand the woman.

Emberly passed six years ago. Grenwood’s husband, Radcliffe, had passed two years before that, of a heart that finally gave out on him in the co op parking lot on an ordinary Tuesday. I remember standing in the receiving line at Radcliffe’s funeral, in my black dress, with a casserole dish in my hands that I had made without entirely deciding to make it, my body simply doing what a Haskett woman’s body does when death visits a house, and Grenwood took the dish from me at the door and looked at me for a long moment and said, “You didn’t have to.”

“I know,” I said. “I wanted the excuse to see your kitchen up close for once.”

She almost smiled. I want that on the record too. Grenwood almost smiled at her own husband’s funeral, at a joke about hotdish, and I think that was the first honest thing that passed between us in nine years.

When Emberly died two years after that, she was the one who organized the funeral lunch. I did not ask her to. I found out only when I walked into the fellowship hall on the worst day of my life and saw her standing at the head of the buffet table in her good navy dress, directing traffic, and there in the center of the spread, in the position of honor, was a tater tot hotdish that was not mine, that I knew from twenty feet away by the particular crosshatch pattern she pressed into the crushed cracker topping with the back of a fork, a habit of hers I had noticed and privately resented for two decades because it was, I admit now, a nicer topping than mine.

I ate two helpings standing at the coffee urn, unable to sit down, and I did not say thank you, because I could not get the words up past the thing sitting in my throat that day. Grenwood found me there. She did not say anything about the hotdish. She put her hand on my arm, just for a second, the way you would steady somebody at the top of a staircase, and then she went back to directing the pie table, and that was all, and it was more than I could have asked of an enemy, and it was exactly what I would have expected of a friend, and I did not have a word yet for what she actually was.

So we come to this past October, and to Hartley, and to the mix up that finally put an end to twenty years of nonsense, though I promise you neither one of us saw it coming that way.

Trinity’s longtime church secretary, a wonderful, exacting woman named Thorpe who had run the office and the paper sign up binder for the fellowship hall kitchen for thirty one years, retired last spring to move closer to her grandchildren in Grand Island. In her place the church council hired Hartley, twenty six years old, new to Haskett by way of a teaching job at the elementary school, cheerful, competent at nearly everything, and utterly, catastrophically devoted to the idea that Trinity Lutheran needed a shared online calendar.

I do not say this to be unkind to Hartley. I have come to be truly fond of her, and I will tell you why in a minute. But that autumn, in the space of about six weeks, Hartley retired Thorpe’s thirty one year old three ring binder, the one with the tabs and the pencil marks and the coffee ring on the cover from roughly 1997, and replaced it with a calendar program on the church office computer that synced, she explained proudly to the council, across all of our phones.

Grenwood and I do not have complicated phones. I will leave it at that.

What happened, as best either of us can reconstruct it, is that Hartley’s new system asked congregants to request a kitchen slot by typing their name into a little box, and both Grenwood and I, independently, on the same Tuesday evening, using the two finger hunt and peck method that is the extent of my typing education, requested the same block of time, three to six on the Saturday before the potluck, the slot each of us had privately, separately, held as our own for the better part of two decades without ever once having to ask anybody’s permission because Thorpe’s pencil simply knew better than to write two names in the same box.

Hartley’s calendar had no such wisdom. It let us both in.

I found out when I arrived at the fellowship hall kitchen at three o’clock on the dot, my grandmother’s roasting pan under one arm and a sack of tater tots and two cans of cream of mushroom under the other, and found Grenwood already standing at the far counter in her apron, unpacking her own sack of tater tots, with the particular set to her jaw that I had learned over twenty years to recognize as trouble.

“I have this slot,” I said.

“I have this slot,” Grenwood said, at the exact same moment, and we stood there, two sixty seven year old women glaring at each other over a stove that had cooked roughly four decades of church suppers and had never once, to my knowledge, hosted a standoff quite like this.

We called Hartley. Hartley arrived within ten minutes, out of breath, phone in hand, looking at her calendar with an expression of pure horror as she scrolled and re scrolled and finally turned the screen around to show us both our names typed into the exact same three hour block, Saturday, three to six, Kitchen A, which is, for the record, the only kitchen Trinity Lutheran has ever had.

“I am so sorry,” Hartley said, and I believed her, because the girl looked like she might cry, and a woman my age does not enjoy watching a twenty six year old cry over a scheduling error, even one that has ruined a war I had, up to that point, no intention of ending. “I can call around. Maybe somebody has a kitchen we could borrow. Miss Tolbert’s got a nice big one out at the parsonage, or the VFW hall might.”

Grenwood and I looked at each other. I want to tell you there was a long, meaningful pause here, some silent understanding passing between two old rivals, but the truth is more embarrassing than that. The truth is that neither one of us wanted to be the woman who admitted, out loud, in front of a twenty six year old, that she would rather drive her hotdish ingredients across town to a borrowed kitchen than share one stove for three hours with the enemy she had been feuding with since the Bush administration.

“We’ll manage,” Grenwood said, before I could say it first, which needled me exactly as much as she intended it to.

“We’ll manage,” I agreed, mostly out of spite.

Hartley, sensing correctly that she had wandered into something far older and stranger than a calendar glitch, retreated to the church office and left us to it.

I wish I could tell you that three hours in a shared kitchen produced an instant and tender reconciliation, the kind you’d get in a made for television movie, with soft music rising as two old women discover they were sisters under the skin all along. What it actually produced, for the first ninety minutes, was a kind of guerrilla warfare over territory. Grenwood took the good oven, the one that runs true to temperature, because she arrived four minutes before I did and I have never let her forget that those four minutes cost me a properly browned topping. I took the stand mixer, out of pure reflex, though neither of our recipes actually calls for one, and left it sitting uselessly on the counter between us like a fence post. We divided the counter space down the middle with an invisible line drawn, I am fairly sure, by pure force of habit, and for a good while the only sounds in that kitchen were the chop of two knives on two cutting boards and the occasional pointed sigh.

It was the tots that finally did us in, or did us a favor, depending on how you look at it.

We had both, at some point in the previous ninety minutes, without discussing it, set our respective casserole dishes to cool on the same stretch of counter by the window, because it is the only stretch of counter in that kitchen wide enough and cool enough to hold a hot pan without the linoleum warping, a fact Thorpe’s binder had apparently encoded into the collective memory of every Trinity woman for three decades. My dish and Grenwood’s dish are, I should mention, nearly identical: both brown speckled nine by thirteen Pyrex, both inherited, both worn pale on the underside from forty years of dish towels, the kind of casserole dish that half the kitchens in this county own because they were a wedding gift from the same three department stores in 1974.

Hartley, trying to be helpful, trying I think to earn back some goodwill after the calendar disaster, came through with a tray to carry both dishes out to the cars, since the potluck itself was to be held the next evening and both dishes needed a night in the church’s walk in refrigerator. In her hurry, and in her genuine desire to be useful to two women she was fairly sure she had personally ruined the week for, she grabbed the two dishes, set them each in a carrier bag, and got the bags crossed.

I did not discover this until the next afternoon, an hour before the potluck, when I pulled what I believed was my hotdish out of my own refrigerator at home, peeled back the foil to check the topping, and found Grenwood’s crosshatch pattern staring back at me instead of my own plain crumb.

I confess my first instinct was pure outrage. I actually said her name out loud to my empty kitchen, the way you’d curse at a dog that had gotten into the trash. I very nearly drove straight to Grenwood’s house to make the swap in the driveway and be done with it, no conversation required. But it was getting on toward four o’clock, and I did not want to arrive at the potluck flustered, so instead I did the thing you do with a strange dish in your kitchen when your mother raised you to always know what you’re serving before you serve it. I turned it over to check the label taped to the bottom, the way generations of Haskett women have marked their good dishes so they come home from a potluck to the right house.

There was a card taped there. Not a name label. A recipe card, yellowed, the tape gone brittle and amber at the corners, clearly older than either Grenwood or me.

I want to be careful here, because this is the part of the story I still find hard to say out loud without my voice doing something embarrassing, so I am going to just tell it plainly.

The card was handwritten, in a looping, old fashioned hand I did not recognize at first, and it was titled, simply, “Hotdish (the Ridgely way).” Underneath, the recipe: tater tots, one pound ground beef, one can cream of mushroom, sharp cheddar, crushed saltines pressed into a crosshatch on top. Grenwood’s exact recipe. Word for word, measurement for measurement, down to the crosshatch instruction.

I sat down at my kitchen table and I read it three times.

I want you to understand why that mattered so much to me, because on its face it is nothing, two women in a small town making the same casserole, which half of Nebraska makes some version of. But that crosshatch topping was the one detail I had spent twenty years privately admiring and never once could bring myself to copy, out of pure stubborn pride, and here it was, on a card old enough to be somebody’s grandmother’s, tucked underneath the dish, and the name on it was not Grenwood’s mother’s name, and it was not mine either.

It was Ridgely.

I knew that name. Everybody over the age of sixty in Haskett knows that name. Sister Ridgely ran the Trinity Lutheran kitchen from about 1958 until her hip finally quit on her sometime in the mid 1980s, a formidable woman by every account I have ever heard, who taught half the young brides in this town how to cook for a crowd, who kept the church supper program running through two building fires and one genuine tornado, and who was, by every account, famous for exactly one dish: a tater tot hotdish with a crosshatch cracker top that she is said to have served at every funeral, wedding, and confirmation lunch in Haskett for nearly thirty years.

I called Grenwood. It took her a minute to answer, and when she did, I did not even say hello. I said, “Turn your dish over.”

There was a pause, and some rustling, and then Grenwood’s voice, oddly flat. “There’s a card taped under here.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s not your recipe. It’s Ridgely’s.”

“It’s not my recipe either, then,” Grenwood said slowly, “because that’s what’s taped under mine too. My mother’s card. Same handwriting. It says Ridgely on the top.”

We were quiet on the phone for a long moment, two old women each holding a dish that was not, strictly, her own, and had never really been her own, not from the very beginning.

Here is what we pieced together over the next hour, half on the phone and half standing in Grenwood’s driveway once I simply could not stand not seeing her face while we worked it out. Sister Ridgely, in the early 1960s, taught that hotdish to a whole generation of young Trinity wives in a Wednesday cooking circle that met right there in that same fellowship hall kitchen, the same stove, likely the same counter by the window. My mother learned it from her. Grenwood’s mother, it turned out, though she had lived forty miles away in a different town for most of her life, had learned an almost identical version from a cousin who had also passed through Ridgely’s Wednesday circle as a girl, visiting relatives in Haskett one particular summer, and had carried the recipe home and taught it to her own daughter the way mine had taught it to me.

We were not, it turned out, rivals cooking two different dishes into an arbitrary competition. We were two granddaughters, in a manner of speaking, of the same kitchen, the same woman, the same crosshatch pattern pressed into a hundred crusts before either one of us was born, competing for twenty years over which of us could more faithfully reproduce the exact same thing.

I laughed first. I want that on the record, because Grenwood will tell you it was her, and she is wrong. I stood in her driveway with a Pyrex dish that was not mine in my two hands and I laughed until I had to set the dish down on the tailgate of my truck for fear of dropping it, and Grenwood stood there watching me with her arms crossed and her chin up, trying very hard to maintain twenty years of dignity, and then she laughed too, and once Grenwood starts, I will tell you, it is not a small or quiet sound. The two of us stood in her driveway on a cold October afternoon, an hour before the Harvest Potluck, laughing loud enough that her neighbor came out onto his porch to see what the trouble was.

“Twenty years,” Grenwood finally said, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist. “Twenty years, Emmerson, over the same casserole.”

It was the first time in two decades she had used my first name instead of just glaring in my general direction, and I noticed it, and I think she noticed me noticing, because she got a little flustered and busied herself retying her apron strings.

“What’s your first name,” I asked her, mostly to cover the moment, and mostly because in twenty years I was not entirely certain I had ever heard anyone use it. I had only ever known her as Grenwood, the way you know a rival by her last name, like a boxer.

“Goodwin,” she said, almost shy about it, which is not a word I ever expected to use about that woman. “Nobody’s called me that since Radcliffe passed.”

“Well, Goodwin,” I said, “we have got exactly fifty minutes to figure out whose casserole goes to the potluck, and I would like to propose we stop being idiots about it.”

We swapped the dishes back, correctly this time. And then, standing in her kitchen with both of Sister Ridgely’s cards side by side on the counter, hers in her mother’s hand and mine in my mother’s hand, forty five minutes to a potluck we had spent two decades trying to win against each other, we did the only thing that made any sense.

We made a third pan. Together. One recipe, doubled, both our hands in the same bowl of tater tots, both our crosshatch patterns pressed side by side into the topping so you could tell, if you looked closely, where my fork had done half the pan and hers had done the other half, a little uneven, a little imperfect, and better than either one of us had ever managed alone in twenty Octobers of trying.

We walked into that fellowship hall together, one dish between us, both our names written on the entry card for the first time in the history of the Harvest Potluck cook off. Hartley saw us come in side by side and went so pale I truly thought the poor girl might faint dead away right there by the coat rack, certain, I think, that she had somehow started the very last fight of a twenty year war rather than ended it.

“We’re not mad at you,” I told her, and I meant it. “You gave us the best mix up of my entire decade.”

We did not win the trophy that year. I want to be honest about that too, because a story like this one is more useful to you if I don’t sand off the ending to make it too neat. Larimore Marlowe’s cheesy potato casserole took the lima beans, and good for Larimore, she has been trying for years and she earned it. But Grenwood and I stood together at the dessert table afterward, watching Sister Ridgely’s hotdish disappear off the buffet in about eleven minutes flat, faster than either of our individual pans had ever gone in twenty years of separate entries, and Pastor Cardwell came by to tell us he had not seen that recipe served in this building since before he was ordained, and that his own mother, it turned out, had learned to cook from Ridgely too, and did we know there was apparently a whole shoebox of her recipe cards still up in the church attic that nobody had gone through since the eighties.

We went through that shoebox the following Tuesday, the two of us, in the fellowship hall kitchen, no double booking required this time because Hartley, mortified and determined to make it up to us, had personally, by hand, written our names into a fresh paper binder she’d bought at the drugstore, retiring her calendar app for kitchen scheduling purposes permanently, which both Grenwood and I consider the single wisest decision that girl has made since she got to Haskett.

That shoebox is why Grenwood and I still cook together every Tuesday afternoon, six months later, working our way through eighty some odd recipe cards in a dead woman’s handwriting, some in fine shape and some so faded we have to hold them to the window to make out the measurements. My granddaughter Jarrell, who is eleven and staying with me most of this summer while her mother finishes a nursing program in Kearney, has taken to riding her bike over on Tuesdays too, and she sits on the counter swinging her feet and pressing crosshatch patterns into cracker toppings with a fork that is nearly as big as her hand, learning the same trick from Grenwood, I mean Goodwin, that Goodwin learned from her mother, who learned it from a formidable church cook forty miles and sixty years away.

We are teaching Hartley too, slowly, though I will tell you she burned a hotdish so badly in April that we had to open both kitchen windows and the church smelled like a house fire clear through Sunday service, and Goodwin and I have not let her live it down, and probably never will, because that, I have come to understand, is simply what it looks like when two old women love somebody. You give them a hard time forever. You never once let it go. You just make sure, underneath it, that they always know there is a chair at your counter with their name on it.

I still hide the good roasting pan from Goodwin sometimes, if I am honest. Old habits carry a long way. But I hide it in her own kitchen now, in the cupboard above the stove where she’d never think to look, and I leave a note taped to the lid in my own handwriting, the same trick she used on me twenty years ago, and it says exactly what hers used to say. Odd place for it. E.

The Harvest Potluck is five months off yet. Goodwin and I have already decided we are entering together again, both our names on one card, Sister Ridgely’s hotdish, crosshatched by four hands instead of two. We are not trying to win anymore. I do not think either one of us much cares about that bowling trophy with the plastic wheat glued on top, though we will absolutely be at the front of the buffet line watching the beans drop into the jar, because old habits, as I said, carry a long way, and neither one of us has ever claimed to be a saint.

What we are trying to do, I think, is finish something Sister Ridgely started in that same kitchen sixty odd years ago and never got to see all the way through: two granddaughters of her Wednesday cooking circle, standing at the same stove, no longer keeping score.

Twenty years I fought that woman over a casserole. I would not trade a single foolish one of them, not the sugar in the salt canister or the missing roasting pan or the six weeks I would not speak to her over a card table full of sample cups, because it turns out all of it, every bit of the nonsense, was just two lonely widows finding the only way they knew how to hold onto each other until they were ready to do it properly.

We’re ready now. Tuesdays, three o’clock, Kitchen A. Jarrell presses the crosshatch. Goodwin runs the good oven. And I keep the recipe cards, all eighty some of them, in my own kitchen now, in a box by the window, where the next set of hands that needs them will know exactly where to look.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.