Comfort Foods

Comfort foods are often the foods that we remember most fondly from our childhood, and sometimes are those foods that as adults we have largely left by the wayside for one reason or another.  We turn to them when we are feeling sad, unwell, or otherwise depressed, and we turn to them as the weather cools each year - the human equivalent of scuttling into our burrows with cheeks full of acorns.

It should come as no surprise then, that many of these foods are warm or hot - soothing in part because warmed foods are easier on the digestive system (the reason that the Japanese often begin a meal with a bowl of hot miso soup) and also because it puts us back to our childhood, when someone who cared about us would be going to the trouble of cooking for us, or at the very least heating something up.

Most of us have a number of comfort foods that we turn to from time to time, and I’ve found that they can be occasion or symptom-specific, but for I think that I have one overriding comfort food that always makes me feel good:  toasted cheese sandwiches, made with sharp cheddar, and tomato soup.  This will always be quintessential lunch food for me.  I can remember running in from playing outside to a steaming bowl of soup and a crunchy brown sandwich, and if the memory itself can’t transport me to a time when the problems of the world didn’t seem too close, the smell and taste of it can.

I can enjoy a tomato soup on its own and experience a low-grade comfort boost, but the toasted cheese sandwich on its own hits a home run, so  I think it’s the sandwich that primarily evokes this feeling, and the soup just ups the ante a little.

I have been reaching into my food memories a lot, recently.  Some of it is the onset of Autumn, which always affects me to one degree or another, and some of it is self-indulgent nostalgia.  I find myself rooting through the recipe box that was my mother's, and occasionally having to call my sister to see if she has a copy of a recipe that I might not have even thought of in years, but suddenly seems very important.  There is, in fact, an Economical Spice Cake cooling on a rack in my kitchen right now, playing with my senses and tweaking my memories.  This was one of the recipes that I learned to bake with, gamely throttling the dough with a hand-held mixer at the tender age of nine or ten, proud as a world-class chef with the squares of spiced curranty goodness regardless of how well it did or didn't rise.  For recipes like these, it isn't only the smells that are evocative, the process of making it can catapult you backward in time until you are standing in your mother's kitchen, holding her best mixing spoon and fumbling through the cupboards that hold the ingredients that you will need.  It's like magic.

Our sense of smell is uniquely linked to memory and emotion, and since our sense of taste is largely dependent on smell, it’s not surprising that food becomes the repository for our sense of emotional stability.  The classic idea of “like mother used to make” is rooted more in a sense of familiarity and our blessedly imperfect memories of being loved than it is any particular intrinsic properties of the dish.

This is not to say that only cherished childhood foods can evoke a sense of comfort, or that we cease to accumulate new comfort foods as we get older.  As long as we are eating new and different things, we acquire new favourites that make it into our regular rotation just as surely as if we had grown up on them.  I present, as Exhibit A, Vietnamese Pho’.  Check marks in the boxes for warm and soothing, familiar (rice noodles are still noodles, after all, and the definitive Pho’ is really still a beef and noodle soup) and I am quite convinced of its curative properties.  Nothing will blow away the onset of a cold, the sniffles and the sore throat, the way a fragrant bowl of Pho’ can.

But, despite the newer additions to my roster of comfort foods, almost anything that my mother used to cook on a regular basis qualifies, and that’s probably true for all of us whether it refers to macaroni and cheese from a box or a spaghetti dinner made in just that certain way.  Food can have negative associations, too, and there are plenty of people out there who won’t touch boxed mac and cheese without a ten-foot insulated barge-pole, and even then it would be to push the box firmly into the trash.

Favourite foods from our childhood evoke a sense of well-being that nothing else quite duplicates.  There’s a sense of familiarity, a sense of rightness that is immeasurably reassuring.

October 2004