Last Suppers is a new column about the food we cook to celebrate and honor the dead by Virginia Willis, author of Bon Appétit Y’all: Recipes and Stories from Three Generations of Southern Cooking. You can find more of Virginia’s recipes here.

Food and cooking are about more than mere calories and keeping the family fed. In times of deep sorrow, food is the glue that keeps society functioning, that keeps us going.

I always laugh to myself when a platter of crescent roll-wrapped “little smokies” is the first empty plate on a funeral buffet, something no one normally eats on a regular basis.

Comfort food is taken to a whole new level when the realization occurs that “I am never going to see my grandmother Meme again, I will never hear her laugh again, I will never get to ask her about how she bakes her cakes again.”

I was working as a professional cook at the time my godfather Uncle Ray passed, but the matriarchs of my family banished me to phone patrol. All I could do was to watch wistfully from the other room as a bevy of bossy Southern women micro-managed making tea and heating up cheese grits casserole brought over from the women from the church. I desperately wanted to get in the kitchen and cook to help stave off the pain. (more…)