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Food Thoughts
Jan. 17th, 2005 08:14 pmFood is a fascinating and wonderful thing. I like to cook, I like to bake, and most of all I like to eat. When I was in vet school I discovered, much to my amazement and horror, that there were people who didn't actually enjoy food, or eating, which I can't understand for the life of me, but planning meals and reading recipes and trying new cuisines are an important source of fun for me. And I started wondering today about what makes something comfort food, rather than 'food I remember from when I was a kid' or 'food I really like.'
My mother is an amazing cook, and I have fond memories of meals when I was a kid, but most of it doesn't leap to mind when I think of comfort food - for all her talent, she was still raising two children, working three jobs, supporting our family more or less singlehandedly, and burdened with two picky eaters. Most of our meals involved frozen fish sticks, or spaghetti sauce from a jar, or Hamburger Helper. When she gets the chance, she can bake amazing and elaborate dishes, but that's not most of what I remember from childhood.
I have foods that I love, too, that don't quite fit the description. I adore lobster, and cheesecake, and blackberries, and anything with scallops, but none of them make me feel safe and comfy and better all over like good comfort food does.
Most of the foods that do aren't quite favorites, exactly, and aren't foods I loved as a kid (with the exception of fried egg sandwiches on toasted rye bread, and that's an easy one to figure out - it was the only thing my father knew how to cook, and one of my few unfailingly positive memories of him, on the rare mornings that my mom would sleep late. Comfort food for me means homemade macaroni and cheese, or red beans and rice, or baked potato soup, or sour cream coffee cake. It's not all warm starchy stuff, though; it's also cucumbers stuffed with tuna salad, and tomatoes fresh from the garden, and sauteed yellow squash. It's interesting; as much as I'm a dessert junkie, almost everything I think of as comforting is savory.
I guess, for me, the comfort is as much in the making of the food as it is in the eating of it. Dinner ritual - pulling out a recipe I know by heart anyway, watching the cookbook fall open to a particular page or walking through garden rows I planted myself, taking shelter in the acts of slicing and stirring and spicing and tasting, until the finished product is the punctuation at the end of a sentence rewriting the day in a much better manner.
Interesting. I don't usually use this journal as an avenue for debate or information-gathering, but now I wonder if it's the same for other cooks, and if it is, what makes something comfort food for non-chefs. Opinions more than welcome.....
My mother is an amazing cook, and I have fond memories of meals when I was a kid, but most of it doesn't leap to mind when I think of comfort food - for all her talent, she was still raising two children, working three jobs, supporting our family more or less singlehandedly, and burdened with two picky eaters. Most of our meals involved frozen fish sticks, or spaghetti sauce from a jar, or Hamburger Helper. When she gets the chance, she can bake amazing and elaborate dishes, but that's not most of what I remember from childhood.
I have foods that I love, too, that don't quite fit the description. I adore lobster, and cheesecake, and blackberries, and anything with scallops, but none of them make me feel safe and comfy and better all over like good comfort food does.
Most of the foods that do aren't quite favorites, exactly, and aren't foods I loved as a kid (with the exception of fried egg sandwiches on toasted rye bread, and that's an easy one to figure out - it was the only thing my father knew how to cook, and one of my few unfailingly positive memories of him, on the rare mornings that my mom would sleep late. Comfort food for me means homemade macaroni and cheese, or red beans and rice, or baked potato soup, or sour cream coffee cake. It's not all warm starchy stuff, though; it's also cucumbers stuffed with tuna salad, and tomatoes fresh from the garden, and sauteed yellow squash. It's interesting; as much as I'm a dessert junkie, almost everything I think of as comforting is savory.
I guess, for me, the comfort is as much in the making of the food as it is in the eating of it. Dinner ritual - pulling out a recipe I know by heart anyway, watching the cookbook fall open to a particular page or walking through garden rows I planted myself, taking shelter in the acts of slicing and stirring and spicing and tasting, until the finished product is the punctuation at the end of a sentence rewriting the day in a much better manner.
Interesting. I don't usually use this journal as an avenue for debate or information-gathering, but now I wonder if it's the same for other cooks, and if it is, what makes something comfort food for non-chefs. Opinions more than welcome.....
