The Comforts of Food: Book Excerpt
| Release date: March 20, 2007 | |
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by: Bonny Wolf '72
My mother came to stay with us for three weeks after my son was born. Every night I asked her to make the same soothing dish for dinner. Somewhere along my road from childhood to childbirth, chicken à la king became for me the most comforting of foods.
This dish has many of comfort foods' requisite features. It's rich, white, creamy, and served over rice, toast or, at my house, popovers. It seems like the right thing in times of need.
To truly comfort, a food must function like a hug from your mother. It makes you feel all better. We ate creamy puddings, roast chicken, and cookies hot from the oven long before we learned the word "stress." Maybe if we eat them again the stress will go away. As the world becomes an ever-more-anxious place, we need our chicken à la king , mac and cheese, or bowl of oatmeal just as a child needs a security blanket. Foods that made us feel safe as children make us feel safe as grown-ups.
I saw a show on the Food Network enumerating the top comfort foods: hot chocolate, fried chicken, ice cream, chicken soup, and the number one comfort dish, meatloaf. Like other plain, simple foods, meatloaf didn’t get much respect once food became stylish. Then meatloaf was reinvented with buffalo and pancetta, turkey and zucchini, venison and sage. I'm not sure nouveau meatloaf has the same comfort quotient as mom's meatloaf or the blue-plate special at the diner, but at least once meatloaf went trendy, saying you felt like making a meatloaf was no longer greeted with a raised eyebrow.
It turns out the consolation we get from certain foods is not just in our heads. Anthropologists tell us that our predecessors would chow down on high-calorie, fatty foods because some brain wave told them to grab a leg of deep-fried woolly mammoth whenever possible to store up fat for leaner times.
Stress Age Homo sapiens have not evolved that much from Stone Age man. University of California physiologists say nervous tension causes the adrenal glands to release so-called stress hormones. Lab rats respond by seeking pleasure, including eating high-energy food. For rodents, this is usually sucrose and lard. For humans, it's more likely a pint of Cherry Garcia. Indulgence tells the brain to relax.
For most of my adult life, I thought my mother had invented the iconic comfort food meal when I was in elementary school: a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of cream of tomato soup. I'm instantly transported to a cold winter morning, trudging through deep snow the three blocks between my grade school and my mother's kitchen where the windows would be steamed up and the smells of tomato and toasting cheese wrapped me up like a warm sweater. Just as the scientists say, it’s a perfect childhood memory: good grease. It turns out that millions of other mothers invented the same lunch to soothe and nourish their children.
Comfort often is about cooking as much as eating. It's the process: wiping off the countertops, taking things out of the cupboard, chopping, mixing, and chopping some more. It's like gardening: It requires mindless concentration, produces results. I'm not much of a baker, but when the world overwhelms me I make a cake. It’s so orderly. Measuring and sifting flour is somehow satisfying, and the whir of the electric mixer is a calming sound. As a bonus, your house has the comfy smell of warm vanilla.
It also matters where you take your comfort. There is a coziness factor to most comfort foods. Avoid a formal dining room or a fancy restaurant. Main-course comfort foods such as chicken à la king or meatloaf belong at the kitchen table. Ice cream and rice pudding are best when you’re curled up on a soft sofa, with a handmade afghan over your lap, watching Casablanca. A fire in the fireplace doesn't hurt.
Our mothers cooked to comfort us, and we often cook the same foods to comfort others. When friends of ours suffered a loss, I made them chicken à la king, the same food I wanted when I became a mother. They said they hadn't eaten it since they were kids. For all of us, it was a dish associated with childhood, with simpler times and simpler places-a dish just right for grown-up life.
From the book Talking with My Mouth Full by Bonny Wolf. Copyright (c) 2006 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press LLC.