He was 66.
Saskatchewan's Covid guidelines allow for funerals, with a maximum of 30 attendees if safe distancing can be maintained and everyone wears a mask and doesn't socialise afterward. Honestly, it was the least "Saskatchewan" event I've ever attended in Saskatchewan. Short about 200 people I didn't know but who somehow knew me. Everyone standing awkwardly 2 metres apart, giving the occasional fist-bump of condolences (if you were lucky to get even that much human contact). No one went out for coffee afterward. Was it even really in Saskatchewan without those things, or did we jump briefly into some parallel plane?
It's a little-known fact that precisely zero comfort or closure can come from a service where there are no egg salad sandwiches and you do not ugly-cry at dozens of elderly strangers; I was yesterday years old when I found that out.
Someone got up to speak a bit about Dad, and they talked about what a good cook he was. In the middle of everything, it actually gave me a little chuckle - he definitely was a good cook, but he wasn't always, and I flashed back to the concoctions he would make for my brother and I when we visited him on weekends after our parents divorced. We ate a lot of squeeze cheeze on crackers, scorched shop coffee heaped with sugar and powdered creamer (which I still have a taste for), and cheap/weird/gross/all-of-the-above things between ultra-thinly-sliced-for-economy white bread (which I do not). But in my mind, the food item most emblemic of those times before Dad figured out how to cook was the butter cabin.
It wasn't called a butter cabin then. I don't think it had a name. It doesn't even have a recipe, exactly, because it's not really made of things you would tend to think of as ingredients for food. Food that you would eat, anyway, and especially feed to children as a meal. But right now it feels important that I share it with you, so here goes.
Butter Cabins
Ingredients
UNgredients?
You will need:
a sleeve of saltine crackers
a pound of butter (fridge cold)
ketchup
HP sauce
a small, sharp knife
You will need:
a sleeve of saltine crackers
a pound of butter (fridge cold)
ketchup
HP sauce
a small, sharp knife
Method:
Sit down at the kitchen table with your... materials. Peel the foil wrapper from the butter. Use the sharp knife to cut medium-thick slices of butter - if it curls up it's too thin, we're building a cabin here so this is not the time to be thinking of heart health. Upon cutting each individual slice, carefully prop it up along one of the edges of a saltine; continue slicing and propping until you have crafted a four-walled, open-ceilinged enclosure out of butter around the perimeter of the cracker. This structure comprises your butter cabin.
Sit down at the kitchen table with your... materials. Peel the foil wrapper from the butter. Use the sharp knife to cut medium-thick slices of butter - if it curls up it's too thin, we're building a cabin here so this is not the time to be thinking of heart health. Upon cutting each individual slice, carefully prop it up along one of the edges of a saltine; continue slicing and propping until you have crafted a four-walled, open-ceilinged enclosure out of butter around the perimeter of the cracker. This structure comprises your butter cabin.
This is where the cabin analogy falls apart, but we shall press on.
Fill the butter cabin with ketchup. Place a small dollop of HP sauce on top of the ketchup. Whole thing immediately down the hatch in one go because it's impossible to bite a quarter cup of ketchup and if you wait too long the walls will melt.
Repeat until your crackers are gone.
Due to attendance restrictions, I think I was the only person at the funeral who knew Dad from before he could cook. I suppose we all feel we know a special, secret side of people in our lives - likely everyone there was thinking about their own unique moments. But our relationship was strained for a long time - don't worry, nothing to do with the weird food, your kids probably won't hold your cooking against you - and maybe I was clinging a bit to the feeling of being an historian specialising in a certain span of his years that no one else there had experienced. Which I suppose is why I wanted to share butter cabins with you: I just needed to work my authority on the subject into the conversation somehow. (Ugh, experts, amirite?)
By the way, I don't recommend trying butter cabins. They're not very good. But if you'd like to borrow the recipe I guess there are worse things to be remembered for.
My takeaway from this experience is that I hope everyone in my life will have some perfectly weird memories of me on file for when I'm no longer around. Each friend and family member can be an expert in some silly, obscure part of my history that no one else knows, and share it (or not) as they see fit. And vice versa - basically, whoever goes first, their survivors should be equipped with things that make them smile, or even more ideally, choke down an inappropriate laugh at the funeral. Exactly the kind of life goal I can get behind.
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