The Sacramental Economy of Food

I. A Eucharistic Logic Beneath the Kitchen Table

Mulhern’s own introduction to All We Ever Needed names food directly as part of the collection’s controlling logic, alongside water: the stories are populated by “a bath drawn for an aging parent, a ride to the beach, a call answered, a gift misunderstood” — ordinary gestures of care that the introduction insists “do not erase suffering” but “reveal the stubborn human wish to be known and cared for despite everything.”¹ What the introduction does not say outright, but what the stories enact repeatedly, is that food in Mulhern’s fiction operates on an explicitly sacramental logic borrowed from and warped by the Eucharist: a substance is blessed by the hand that prepares it, transferred to a body that consumes it, and made to carry the maker’s love or intention directly into the recipient. This essay argues that Mulhern’s recurring food scenes are not simply a motif of domestic tenderness but a working theology of transmission — and that the collection’s two poisonings, far from being a shocking break from that theology, are its logical and most terrifying extension.

II. Cookies as Grace: The Ordinary Sacrament

The baseline form of the pattern is uncomplicated maternal and grand-maternal feeding, most fully worked out in “Mia Bambina.” When Nonna sends Molly away to college, she sends cookies with a note that fuses nutrition, threat, and blessing into a single unbroken register: “Here are some cookies for the sweetest cookie in my life. You must swear to eat them all yourself!… A curse on you if you don’t eat every last one of these cookies yourself. I want you to be fatter the next time I see you… Nonna loves mia bambina.”² The note’s odd swing from endearment to curse and back is not comic excess for its own sake; it is the vocabulary of a woman for whom feeding a child correctly is a moral obligation with real stakes, on the model of a sacrament withheld or received unworthily. The demand that Molly “swear” to eat them “yourself,” excluding the dormitory roommate entirely, marks the cookies as a private rite between two people, not a general kindness — closer to a chalice than a snack.

III. The Same Vessel, Weaponized: “Sure, mia bambina. What’s one more ingredient?”

The horror of “Mia Bambina” is structural rather than merely plot-driven: Mulhern does not introduce a new, sinister object to carry out the murder. He reuses the exact vessel of tenderness already established — Nonna’s cookies — and simply adds an ingredient. When Molly needs to eliminate her roommate Ashley, she goes to the same grandmother, using the same register of family favor: “Getting the cyanide from Mr. Scarfone, a mobster friend of my grandmother’s, was easy. She was always saying she would do anything for her ’precious granddaughter,’ so when I asked her to bake the special cookies, she said, ’Sure, mia bambina. What’s one more ingredient? Not a problem.’”² The line’s horror is entirely in its syntax: “what’s one more ingredient” treats cyanide as continuous with flour, sugar, and chocolate chips, a domestic addition rather than a moral rupture. Nonna’s willingness collapses the distance between nurture and murder into a single unbroken gesture of love — she is not persuaded to kill; she is asked to bake, and baking is what she has always done for this particular granddaughter. The novel’s closing image confirms the sacramental register explicitly: Molly plans to “compliment her on the effectiveness of her wording in the note,” noting that Nonna “would be happy to know that Ashley had died for her sins and that her cookies were a perfect hit”² — the phrase “died for her sins,” borrowed intact from the vocabulary of atonement, recasts a poisoning as a kind of liturgical justice administered through food.

IV. Peppermint as Absolution and as Weapon

“Peppermint Candy” performs the identical operation in miniature and in reverse order — the poisoning precedes, rather than follows, the story’s use of candy as ordinary comfort. The narrator, a teacher retaliating against a student’s humiliation, prepares the weapon with clinical, almost priestly care: “I thought of the care I had taken to lightly rub Visine onto the candy before rewrapping it,”³ language that treats the rewrapping — restoring the candy’s innocent appearance — as part of the ritual’s completion, not an afterthought. The story’s final line performs the same collapse “Mia Bambina” performs: after poisoning one student, the narrator writes, “I retrieved the peppermints from my desk drawer and placed them in my satchel. I would share them again another day,”³ restoring the candy immediately to its ordinary, communal function of being shared. The peppermint does not stop being a treat because it has also been a poison; the story insists these are the same object serving the same social function — a small gift passed from an authority figure to a dependent — regardless of what has been added to it. This mirrors “Assumptions,” where peppermint candy first appears innocently, “enjoying the deliciousness of peppermint candy, swinging our legs together,” establishing the object’s baseline sweetness before the collection later corrupts it — the reader is trained, across the arc of the book, to receive peppermint as tenderness, which is precisely what makes its later weaponization effective rather than merely shocking.

V. Whiskey, Sugar Cubes, and the Communion of the Table

Not every food exchange in the corpus curdles into violence, and the essay’s argument depends on the fact that most do not: the sacramental logic is visible precisely because most transmissions remain benign, making the poisoned ones legible as corruptions of a norm rather than a separate category of event. In “Assumptions,” Peggy Fleming passes the young narrator a sugar cube “that she kept in her pocketbook in case her insulin dropped suddenly,” accompanying it with reassurance about a lost dog — “We saved Scruffy’s life, sweetheart… Sometimes that’s the way it has to be, my love”⁴ — a moment in which a diabetic woman’s emergency medical supply becomes, in the same gesture, a token of comfort passed to a grieving child. The child is in turn taught to “pour her whiskey sours,” his grandmother supervising the dosage (“Not too much, sweetheart”)⁴ — establishing a lineage of controlled substances (sugar, whiskey, later peppermint, later cyanide) moving hand to hand between generations, each transfer carrying both practical risk and emotional intention. The meal itself, not just its contents, repeatedly does theological work: the family’s habitual gathering around food and drink is explicitly a site of confession, testimony, and communal absolution, as when the whole extended family sits for “meatballs,” whiskey, and unresolved grievance in the “Myra Bocca” and Molly Bonamici material — food is the occasion under which secrets surface, not incidental to it.

VI. Conclusion: Feeding as the Family’s Native Grammar

Read across the collection, food in Mulhern’s fiction functions less like a recurring image than like a grammar — a fixed set of gestures (prepare, offer, insist on consumption, receive) that the family uses to say what it cannot say directly. Love, obligation, grief, and now murder are all conjugated through the same verb: to feed someone is to act on them, directly and physically, in a way words cannot guarantee. This is why the collection’s cyanide cookies and poisoned peppermints do not read, on the page, as a genre swerve into thriller mechanics; they read as the darkest possible sentence written in a grammar the reader has already been taught to trust. Mulhern’s introduction calls naming “a kind of devotion” and describes his stories as “prayers.”¹ The collection’s most disturbing achievement is to show that a family’s prayers and a family’s poisons can be prepared, in the end, in exactly the same kitchen, by exactly the same beloved hands.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays All We Ever Needed