Over the sliced potatoes I pour melted butter thickened with flour, stirred until warm with milk and cheese. I'm sure the food is comfort food because it is the food of my childhood. And I am confident that Maxine, at sixty, shares this Midwestern experience. The ingredients of comfort food are milk, butter, cream, eggs, cheese, potatoes, onions and bread. These are the ingredients of farming, the childhood lunch and dinner tables of the generation before mine. Potato salad, potato soup, boiled eggs, white bread.

Meat, of course, is often added, but usually as bits of ground beef or pork. I've been vegetarian for two decades now and have frequently wondered how such a small amount of meat can make any difference in the success of a recipe and am annoyed when its inclusion makes it inedible for me. Once during midyear Meeting at Bear Creek , I was working with Wanda in the kitchen making lunch for a hundred Quakers or more and I asked her why we "ruined" a large pot of lentil soup with such a small bit of pork. She said the Quakers like meat but are too poor to have much. At the time of my asking most members of Meeting were wealthier than I was and could afford as much meat as they wanted. Perhaps the remembrance of being too poor for much meat is a note written in the recipe margin from the generation before.

My father says something similar about growing up one of 10 children on a Dakota farm. After the depression when his father lost everything, the family ate what was available: potatoes, milk, eggs and white bread mostly. In my childhood memory, he craved pot roast, pork chops, and steaks. Today I cut an onion like my grandmother, first cutting deep into it across the face of a slice, then cutting again, intersecting the first cuts, and finally slicing my cuts until the onion drops onto the board in small cubes. Here at the cutting board without a written recipe, I remember a farm woman two generations back.

Three bean salad and Jell-O salads are the church pot luck companions. They are neighborly food, not as comforting, perhaps, but familiar.

What are the comfort foods of the next generation? Will bags of fast food burgers or KFC in buckets be brought to the homes of the grieving? Will plastic liter bottles of soda take the place of the multi-cupped coffee pot at the table during visitation?

I keep peeling potatoes. Looking beneath the skin. There's plenty of time to think as I peel. Think about this cookbook and the meals my Mother used to prepare. The hot dishes of my childhood. The curious notion of comfort food, of comforting with food, the comfort of food.