The Lessons of a Tuna Noodle Casserole

“We have to stop meeting like this,” Doctor Carney told me.


Of course, he was right. No nice Jewish girl should spend Friday night in the emergency room getting her left little finger sewn back on.


“You can’t bend it or get it wet for a week,” he told me. “Then you can come back to my office to get the stitches taken out.”


“Not get it wet?” I recoiled. “How am I going to wash my face? I’ll be the first college student in history to cut her finger on a tuna noodle casserole and die of terminal acne!”


But I’m getting ahead of myself. Perhaps I brought it all on by violating the commandment against carrying a tempered glass casserole dish from one building to another on the Sabbath, much less a dish borrowed from somebody who didn’t keep kosher, but there were limits on what a poor college student could find in her dorm in Grinnell, Iowa back in the early 1970’s. Besides, I had I promised the dish’s owner that I would return it safely before the next day. No, I wouldn’t lose it, I promised. No, I wouldn’t break it, I promised. Yes, I would clean it, I promised.


I cooked the noodles, mixed them together with the tuna, the can of mushroom soup, the chopped onion, the seasonings, and the package of frozen green peas, baked it, and took it to the potluck. Do you want to know how far I had to walk and how many grocery stores I had to explore before I found peas in Grinnell, Iowa back in the early 1970’s that weren’t canned, but frozen?  No, you don't.


Afterward, I washed that tempered glass casserole dish as well as I could in the Forum kitchen and set off up the icy path toward my residence hall. It was a short walk, but it was up a steep incline. “I’m going to slip on this ice and break this dish,” I told myself. And despite my best effort to step carefully, I was right. I fell, the glass broke, and one of the pieces went into my little finger.


My first reaction was to run to the bathroom, leaving a trail of red drops on the floor, to wash my finger and stanch the flow of blood. After a reasonable interval, this action resulted in a sink full of cold, bloody water and a comparable trail of red drops leading away from the sink. The evening ended in the emergency room of the hospital, where Dr. Carney stuck my poor traumatized finger with needles: first to anesthetize the area, and then to put in five sutures. The next day, I told my friend Patricia about my adventure, and she responded by saying, “Oh, so it was your blood I wiped up off the floor in the Forum last night.” I now have only a thin scar and the horrible memory.


Had I not suffered this injury, gone to the hospital, and sustained the scar, I might not have retained the worst memory of the evening, which was not the pain in my finger, nor the bleeding. No, what hurt the most that evening was the affront to my culinary judgment. That tuna noodle casserole would have been one of hundreds that I prepared, ate, and forgot. However, the experience of cutting my finger and needing five stitches seared that particular tuna noodle casserole into my memory for life and taught me an important lesson about how not to make a tuna noodle casserole for ungrateful strangers.  The sorry truth is that at the potluck, I sat next to someone who picked out every last pea and moved it to the side of his plate. 


I understood his feelings about peas; I have the same relationship with celery. I know; everybody in this world seems to like celery, but I don’t. I like peas. Fresh peas, pea soup, even canned peas. I also like artichokes, asparagus, beets, broccoli, eggplant, leeks, parsnips, rutabagas, sweet potatoes, and Swiss chard, but to me, a tuna noodle casserole without peas just isn’t a tuna noodle casserole. So after all the effort of finding peas for this casserole, the pea-picking comportment of my dinner companion saddened me.

I have a reason for writing this story. I belong to a group called Tikkun Ha-Ir, and once a month we provide a meal at a local homeless shelter. The coordinator of this effort asked me to make a couple of tuna noodle casseroles. The shelter’s guests, upon eating my tuna noodle casserole came back for second and third servings. Now they ask me to bring my tuna noodle casserole every month, and people began to suggest that I write out my recipe and post it on the Tikkun Ha-Ir website.

Potluck Tuna Noodle Casserole

Mix together: A large package of noodles, cooked al dente and drained
A large can of tuna
A small onion, chopped
Three stalks of celery, chopped
A can of cream of celery soup
Salt, pepper, and/or your favorite savory seasoning
Put the mixture into a greased baking dish
Sprinkle top with a cup of breadcrumbs, ground cheese crackers or ground salty snack mix
Bake at 350 degrees


Note: This is not the recipe I follow at home.