Sprinkle with cheese if desired
A microwave lasagne made me want to cry
Image Credit: Patrick McKenzie and Harry Gay
When you’re a kid and your parents get you a babysitter, a particular sense of uncertainty emerges. Regardless of whether it’ll be your school friend’s older sibling or your hairdresser’s younger sister, the same questions remain:
Will they let me play PS2 as late as I want?
What’s for dinner?
The answer to the first was almost always no; I was (un-)lucky enough to have parents who ensured that any Simpsons: Hit & Run marathon wouldn’t extend past such a time where they’d have arrived home to find me bleary eyed, ploughing through the tomacco farm in the Malibu Stacy Car. The babysitter would be instructed thusly to send me to sleep by about 9pm.
The answer to the final question was also often the same: lasagne. Specifically, Woolworths’ refrigerated lasagne that could be cooked in the oven or — for the less gourmet among the babysitting population — the microwave. I was allowed to use neither appliance and so the method was always a mystery to me, but I knew I loved the outcome: A gummy, meaty, tomato-y rectangle, saturated with bechamel, emitting an oil-tinged steam as it emerged from the oven after 45 minutes or so at 180 degrees fan-forced.
I spent years toiling over my small wedge of this semi-bastardised Italian delight. Having begun as an oddity of evenings where I was babysat, it eventually became something I looked forward to, until I took the time to look at the packaging myself during a fateful trip to the grocery store. The instructions, as I would later learn in my post-babysitter years, were pretty standardised regardless of the brand:
Pre-heat oven to 190 degrees (180 fan-forced).
Remove sleeve and pierce film.
Cover product with foil and place product on a baking tray.
Place baking tray in oven, directly onto middle rack and heat for 30 minutes.
Carefully remove foil and heat for a further 15 minutes until golden brown.
Carefully remove baking tray from the oven.
Allow to stand for 1 minute. Sprinkle with cheese if desired. Serve.
So restrained, cold, robotic. With the exception of the final step: Sprinkle with cheese if desired. A twinkle of personhood amid a dark sky of impersonal phrasing. A lonely copywriter — presumably hunched over some sort of humming laptop of antiquity, punching cooking instructions in 12pt Courier font into a now-redundant word processor — eager to leave an impression. In evoking desire, the instructions cease to be deterministic.
I was immediately overcome with a profound sense of forlornness. Amidst the procedural nature of a meal squeezed into a tray and sealed in plastic, the grocery stores’ willingness to confer but a modicum of choice onto the felt like a half-baked apology.
We tried to give you lasagne. Put cheese on it if you want.
This seemingly innocuous step now has vanished from the packaging of both Coles and Woolworths lasagnes. Perhaps the casualty of a rebrand at some point. Today, most of my lasagnes are single serve, and I always cook them in the microwave. Besides stirring in the odd hunk of brie thieved from the walk-in fridge at work, scarcely will I sprinkle them with cheese, but should I desire to one day, I know it’ll be ok.