Please tell us more about the funeral potatoes.
Starting with if they're made /for/ funerals and how many deaths Mormons are raking up for funerals to be on the list of frequent social gatherings
Funeral potatoes are made with shredded potato, cheese, cream of chicken, and butter. They are also traditionally topped with some kind of crunchy carbohydrate, such as crushed potato chips, or corn flakes, and, if one is feeling extra fancy, green onion.
They are, in terms of energy density (joules/kg) comparable to uranium fuel pellets.
They are made for funerals. They aren't made only for funerals, but if there's a funeral, they will be there. They follow casserole scaling rules, so you can bake five at a time, and they freeze stupidly well, which means that all you have to do before the funeral is reheat them. They can also be sent home with the bereaved to help them mourn a little easier. One of those casseroles can feed a family of four for like. Two days in desperate times, or a week if just eaten for dinner. I remember there being a sort of unspoken goal in the ward for people that had a loved one die not needing to cook for a month. I don't know how well that was always met but it was kind of The Goal.
Regarding how often we have funerals: Mormons used to be spectacular at dying, absolutely world class, but I'm not sure if that lines up exactly with the funeral potatoes lifetime. There are recipes for it that date back to the 1910s, which is before the Mormons took out the mandatory oath of eternal vengeance against the US government from the temple ceremonies, but also, well after they got chased around by mobs.
I think, maybe, that Mormons go to a lot of funerals because they live extraordinarily interconnected lives. Like, the first thing I'll point out is that Mormons have big families, and they used to have even bigger families. So when my dad's whole family met up, it was around 40 people. My moms side was a a little smaller, but still, 30ish? And I knew people went to family reunions where they had 80+ cousins per side.
The second thing I'll point out is that the wards themselves are highly enmeshed. The ward I grew up in had around 250 people in it, and I bet if I sat down and tried I could still write down most of their names. Their last names, definitely. I didn't know how strange that was until I was an adult. I had no idea how atomized the world was until I stepped outside that bubble.
So my immediate network had... 70 people in it, and my local network had another 250ish, which meant that I knew on like. A life story level, approximately 320 people.
And I have autism. There were, in every ward, three or four old ladies that had whatever the opposite of autism is, and I think they might have literally known several thousand people. You could talk to them for a few minutes, and they'd look a little confused, then you'd mention some family member and you'd see them mentally sliding you into some insane Bene Gesserit family tree and they'd go "Ohhhhhhhhhhh, you're Don's grandson" like that explained everything. And it might have, to them. There was a story going on their minds that was too big for me to ever understand.
Anyway, In a world with at least 320 people in it, someone, somewhere, is always grieving. So there are always potatoes to be made. And they were.
