Potatoes for Dolly

Here is a dish that we bring when words fall short. A cheesy one-pan potato casserole of comfort. It goes by the name funeral potatoes, and it’s what you bring when a neighbor is grieving.

This week, the whole country is the neighbor. So I made funeral potatoes for Dolly Parton. The recipe is below.

Dolly loved potatoes the way the rest of us do, which is to say without dignity. “Every diet I ever fell off of has been because of a potato,” she told Wired’s autocomplete interview. French fries, mashed, baked. She never met a spud she didn’t like, and she confessed elsewhere that she could only go so many days without what she called a “tater fix.”

So a casserole that is mostly potatoes, cheese, and butter would have met her standards. But the dish fits her for a better reason than the ingredients. Funeral potatoes are food with a job: they exist to be given away. And giving things away, quietly and constantly, was the through-line of her whole life.

The tributes this week will cover the songs, and they should. Three thousand of them. What follows is the part that never made the chorus.

When wildfires tore through Sevier County in 2016 and destroyed the homes of more than 900 families, her My People Fund gave every one of them $1,000 a month for six months, no income test, no bureaucratic obstacle course. Donations outran expectations, so the final checks grew to $5,000 per family, with $8.9 million going directly to fire victims and millions more committed to the long recovery after the news trucks left.

In the early nineties, her home county had a dropout crisis. Her answer was the Buddy Program: she personally promised seventh and eighth graders $500 if they graduated, paired with a buddy so no one crossed the finish line alone. By the foundation’s accounting, the dropout rate for those classes fell from 35 percent to 6.

In April 2020, she gave $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center for coronavirus research. The lead researcher later told the New York Times her gift funded the “critical” early stages of the work that became the Moderna vaccine, and the published study credits the Dolly Parton COVID-19 Research Fund by name.

The royalties from Whitney Houston’s cover of “I Will Always Love You” made her millions. She used them to buy an office complex in a Black neighborhood of Nashville, in Whitney’s honor. “This is the house that Whitney built,” she said.

Her Imagination Library has now mailed more than 300 million books to children around the world. She built it because her father, one of the smartest people she knew, never learned to read.

And when recognition came for all of it, she kept dodging. She turned down the Presidential Medal of Freedom twice. When Tennessee legislators moved to put a statue of her at the state capitol, she asked them not to, saying she didn’t think putting her on a pedestal was appropriate.

She didn’t serve to be seen. Being seen was her day job. Serving was her life.

• 3 Russet potatoes (2 lbs)

• ½ med yellow onion, finely grated

• 16 oz of sour cream

• 1 can of cream of chicken soup

• 1 stick of melted butter

• 2 cups of shredded cheddar cheese

• 1 tbsp garlic powder

• 1 tbsp onion powder

• 1 tbsp smoked paprika

• ½ tbsp black pepper

• 1 tsp salt

For Topping:

• 2 cups of corn flakes

• 3 tbsp of melted butter

For Garnish

• Chopped parsley or chives (optional)

1. Grease or Spray a 9x13 baking dish and preheat the oven to 350ºF.

2. Peel potatoes and dice or coarsely grate (or a mix of both for a nice texture combination), rinse and place in a large mixing bowl.

3. Add the grated onion, sour cream, cream of chicken can, melted butter, grated cheese, garlic powder, onion powder, smoked paprika, salt and pepper. Mix until fully incorporated.

4. Pour mixture into the baking dish. Use a spatula to level the top surface.

5. Pour corn flakes into a small mixing bowl and crush by hand to desired texture. Add butter and mix until evenly coated. Sprinkle corn flake mixture onto potatoes to make an even layer.

6. Bake for 65-75 minutes, or until potatoes are cooked through and tender.

7. Remove from oven and allow to cool for five minutes. Sprinkle with chives and/or parsley if desired.

8. Spoon into bowls and serve. Enjoy!

Slade Wentworth | The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way.