September 2020

My mother was an excellent cook and baker who, unfortunately, never instructed my sister, Bambi, or me how to prepare her delectable dishes.

After her diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and when she was no longer able to make my family’s favorite stuffing recipe, we got used to having a “Stove Top” substitute because somehow we subliminally believed that she would magically be able to provide us with the recipe.

After she died, the need to have this recipe and bring her memory alive, at least through food, became paramount. Bambi made the first attempt. It wasn’t bad but it just wasn’t the recipe. She tried again, and although we appreciated her efforts to have it on the table again it fell short of our expectations and made us sad that this wasn’t what we loved eating all of these years. But it did help us to realize just how important having her stuffing was to our family. So what to do?

Finally on one rainy fall day, I decided to buy an insanely large number of bags of Pepperidge Farm Seasoned Stuffing mix, the main ingredient, and was determined to keep making stuffing all day until it tasted like Mom’s Thanksgiving stuffing and deserved to be on our table.

So I rolled up my sleeves, and started to open up the first bag of stuffing when my eye caught some words on the back of the bag that seemed strangely familiar to me; and why not, it was Mama Schnall’s Thanksgiving Stuffing recipe on that bag, verbatim!