The Best Dessert Mom Made for Us, but Better

In my mother’skitchen, in the cabinet above the stove, lives a rectangle baking pan. It is chestnut brown, true to the 1970s, the decade she bought it as a young wife and new mother. It has knife scrapes along the bottom, spatula scratches along the sides, a few dents here and there from being packed and shipped and unpacked in countless kitchens, from the southern tip of Georgia to the middle of Bavaria. It is a talisman of my youth, a rare constant from the life of a wayward military brat.

This metal pan has two jobs, and two jobs alone: baking my mother’s chicken casserole and setting and chilling her four-layer surprise for dessert. Nothing is ever prepared in it otherwise. And more important, when those dishes are made in anything besides the pan, they aren’t quite the same.

Recipe: Four-Layer Surprise

Once you start asking, you realize that nearly everyone has a version of this pan in his or her life — and an exalted recipe to go with it. A midcentury aluminum Bundt-style pan that defines a friend’s mother’s simple sour-cream poundcake is stashed in some kitchen cupboard in Florence, Ala. One specific skillet, the vessel for a perfect clafoutis that another friend’s elderly French uncle has made since the ’60s, hangs above a stove in a Maine farmhouse. My uncle’s pizza pan is already being secretly fought over as an inheritance — even though he’s still baking his famous Brooklyn pies in it.

We didn’t need a special occasion for our pan to be put into action. On a standard weekday, I might see it sitting on the kitchen counter before school, hinting at my mother’s plans for the evening. I was always delighted when I would come home to find that it wasn’t in the oven, which meant it was in the refrigerator, stacked with four layers of the most common store-bought ingredients — resting, becoming something that, to me at that age (and currently, quite honestly), was just about as good as things got.