Longing for comfort
The best cheese on toast I ever ate was when I was seventeen and tripping. Somehow, despite believing myself to be the Queen of Belgium And All of Europe as I sat in the window of a weaver’s cottage with an orange affixed to the top of a sharp stick (there were no click-and-collect sceptre sales in the eighties), I managed to find time away from the onerous responsibility of Queening to make myself something to eat.
I have spent too much time and energy chasing the past perfection of that piece of sliced white bread, loaded with what my grandfather called ‘trap cheese’ from the local market. All I remember is its absolute platonic cheesy ideal, the visceral nature of the moment, and the fact that each bite seemed to melt so wholly in the mouth that I felt real puzzlement about where it went. Swallowing as a function was suddenly rendered obsolete. How I did not choke to death, I do not know. You know that thing that young babies do when they learn about object permanence and spend their whole time looking for where dropped things have gone? Well, this is me with that piece of cheese on toast - for the rest of my life.
We are all seekers. When Jenny Linford started her Twitter hashtag #7favouritecomfortfoods, the social media site was awash with longing and nostalgia, an overwhelming sense of what the Welsh call Hiraeth and the Portuguese know as Saudade. Because none of us can really go back, not truly, at best, we can invoke a fleeting moment, a memory. Maybe the reaching, the striving, is where most of the fulfilment lies. It reminds me of the old - and not necessarily correct - junkie saying about addiction being the consequence of a search to replicate that first hit. The bliss point of whatever it is you are doing, be it eating, drinking, running, having sex, or taking drugs, can arrive early on, or you might take a while to get there or never really at all. Then, there is the trippiness of memory. Recalling our favourite comfort food is like a flashback, a little taste on the mind’s tongue. It is pretty psychedelic what our minds and bodies are capable of on their own when we drop our adult guard.
And I think this is part of the mechanism of longing for the comfort of foods we eat during the most formative parts of our lives, especially childhood when our sense of self as an autonomous, separate being is less established. Much of the difficulty around being a self-governing adult- that Western obsession- can be transcended by surrendering our need for the rule of the self. We can temporarily cast off these boundaries by evoking a simpler, more childlike time when growing up was as much a process of forgetting as it was acquiring, and much of the world remained beyond our reach and control. The eating of certain meals helps dissolve the boundaries erected around our adult selves in much the same way as LSD is believed to blur the way the brain filters sensory information.
Then there’s repetition and the kind of memory that this embeds in the body's muscles and the emotional fibre of the mind. I want you to imagine you are about to make a cup of tea. What do you do first? Quite a few of us will think of putting kettles on or retrieving our favourite mug, or we might imagine going to the cupboard for the tea caddy or rushing to the store in a state of high dudgeon because we have run out of tea. This task is so fundamental to our lives that teamaking assessments form an essential part of the work of an occupational therapist in assessing a person’s capacity to function best in their home or whatever environment they find themselves in.
What actually comes first in the great teamaking odyssey is the recognition that you are thirsty. This is not a given; many conditions interfere with our ability to recognise and satisfy hunger and thirst on a physiological or psychological level. Meeting our activities of daily living requires volition, motivation, and the ability to logically sequence our actions to build a new corporeal reality. Part of this imagines a future that does not yet exist- a future in which we are no longer thirsty- and this requires us to transcend the boundary between now ─thirsty─ and soon ─no longer thirsty.
Our impulses and whether we can understand and act on them bridge this gap, and for a moment─ we have a foot in both camps. To be able to do this is powerful, reinforcing medicine. Think about those times when you have been thirsty and parched, even. Imagine long, tall drinks in frosted glasses, your frantic gulping down of icy cold water, horchata, coke, juice; how single-minded you are as you go about getting that drink. Every possible obstacle on the bridge to Not Thirsty is identified and eliminated. And this is why conditions like dementia can be so devastating because we lose our ability to build this bridge. Longer-term memories are retrievable, but they no longer underpin the future in a dynamic or evolving way. Brian Eno talked of “a certain mental tone like people talk about body tone, " which is relevant. When we lose our volitional memories, we lose mental tone.
And that cup of tea? No two cups are ever the same despite the repetitiveness of the teamaking task, a repetitiveness that, over the years, masks the complex cognitive and emotional processes that drive the physical actions involved in making a cup of tea. We stop considering how we do the things we do yet continue to seek an exact replication of a remembered comfort or circumstance.
When Jenny Linford asked me to list my 7 favourite comfort foods, I did not doubt what one would be: chicken, potato, chile and rice guisada, a fifth-generation recipe from Mexico. The original version belongs to my adopted abuela, which she taught to her daughter, who taught my mother and me, and I, in return, taught my own children. ‘My’ recipe is not the same as that of mi abuela, but it is still nostalgic and comforting, the result of an evolutionary process that, to date, has guaranteed its continued existence in a profoundly ironic way. I also ask myself, “Does eating comfort foods actually elicit comfort?” because personally, my memories of this childhood stew are sauced by unhappy family relationships, which tend to awaken alongside happier memories of the Mexican women who fed me. The answer to this question might be ‘no; I am not necessarily comforted by the eating and making of the stew, but what I have done, at least, is recognise and acknowledge my mood.’ And for a lot of us, that is quite a hard thing to do. There is both regression and progression when we knowingly seek comfort through cooking and eating.
When James Hansen interviewed me for In Digestion, he said something that I did not fully consider but has preoccupied me since. You seem to write about places from the point of view of no longer being in them, he asked. I guess many writers do, especially food writers, because essentially, once a meal (or place) is chewed and swallowed, it becomes changed in form and essence. We are no longer in that moment; it is now inside us. We extract what we need from a meal, and we expel the rest in a literal and literary sense, and our psyches are more conflicted by this than we consciously realise. We are no longer there but here, eating, repeating, regurgitating, and excreting—what a trip.
Further reading:
Travelling around Florida, we stopped to eat at Cracker Barrel, an American restaurant chain that mimics ‘traditional’ country stores if all country stores were white-owned. It was as if I had stepped into the pages of ‘Farmer Boy’ as I walked around this carefully staged paean to a rural and artisanal past that has been all but exterminated by capitalism’s successful commodification of comfort and ease. In ‘Dine 'n' Unwind: Comfort Food in Late Capital’, Eitan Freedenberg argues that vernacular comforts as presented by Cracker Barrel and its ilk do not offer sustainable states of being, especially when the seeking out of comfort through food can be framed as a trauma response, whether this is from the “spatial and temporal alienation…of the engulfing joylessness of interstate”, the “present socioeconomic order” or our own gnarly psyches. In this paper, there is a conflation of ‘comfort food’ with ‘guilty pleasures, which I would argue are not one and the same, but overall this chewy and interesting argument through the lens of a restaurant chain managed to suck me in despite my misgivings.
Forklife: Food and Longing in the Armenian Diaspora: “I still long for my grandmother’s food. The taste lingers in my mouth until today. My mom cooks so often, and it is the food, but the taste of my grandmother’s food was different. We would search for that taste since we were little. My mom would cook, and we would tell her something was missing. She would tell us to stop searching for that taste in our mouths. And for that reason, as chefs, we notice when something is missing.”
The power of food memories in identity formation and a cornucopia of references via the Oxford Food Symposium.
“Milk toast” has become a bit of an insult, and the very thought of eating it makes me gag. Still, I do like MFK Fisher’s essay about what many consider to be the ultimate comfort meal, a "warm, mild, soothing thing, full of innocent strength", and wrote that the dish was "a small modern miracle of gastronomy". It was the dish she prepared for food writer James Villas when he came to interview her despite his suffering from the effects of a lousy oyster eaten the night before. Fisher gamely interviewed herself as he lay on the sofa, a bowl of milk toast set before him. Before eating milk toast, she writes, “walk gently to wherever you have decided to feel right in your skin.”
However, Fisher is at her best when writing about the flip side of indulgence in comfort, alcoholism, and how nostalgic yearnings are sometimes best left in mind. In ‘Once a Tramp, Always…’ she writes about the usefulness of verbalising one’s love for a particular comfort food instead of ingesting it and of the disappointment when a longed-for gooseberry pie from childhood made real in adulthood turns out to be a horror, “those pale, beady acid fruits, the sugar never masking their mean acidity…the crust sogging”. Then, there is her management of longing in the form of memorialising time spent in Lausanne when she sat at the bar and ate potato chips. This is a memory that enables her to be firm not to end up “eating my way through barrels, tunnels, mountains, more of them here in the land where they hang like square cellophane fruit on wire trees in all the grocery stores, to tempt me sharply every time I pass them".
“Sad child may overeat! is the headline on a Palm Beach Post story from 1966, believed to be one of the first uses of the term ‘comfort food. Here’s The Atlantic on the social function of ‘comfort food’.
More on the origins of ‘comfort food’ on the wonderful Timeline.Org.
“The medicalisation of food deprives the dying,” says Dr Jessica Nutik Zitter, a palliative care physician from California, in this piece about eating during the last stage of life. “Understanding food comfort starts by understanding what it means, broadly, to be comfortable,” the article says as it examines how kitchen design, food technology, and the medical and social care community can ensure ‘comfort in eating’ is seen in the round for the material, social, sensory and mental construct it actually is.
When Peter Gether’s mother, Judy, had a stroke and was no longer able to cook, he wanted to give her the gift of a fantastic feast made up of the foods she loved. This was a tall order because Judy Gethers was not only the daughter of a restauranteur but also a friend and mentor to many famous American chefs, including Nancy Silverton and Wolfgang Puck. And Peter couldn’t cook. ‘My Mother’s Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and the Meaning of Life’ is his memoir about the importance of food and his own cookery journey alongside that of his aphasic mother, who was initially resistant to speech therapy. Judy slowly realised that talking about and cooking food with the chef Peter hired to look after her proved that she still had the ability to teach and learn and appreciate this new phase of her continuing life.
The idea of finding respite in the eating of factory-produced foods is an interesting corollary to the effects of emotion-laden sandwiches made by a lovelorn colleague or the complex taste of baked chicken redolent with a mother’s unfulfilled seeking. In the former, there is a flatness of the untouched ingredients, which offers Rose, our protagonist, relief from others' emotional demands in Aimee Bender’s novel, ‘The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake’. I am surprised Rose cannot taste the hardships endured by the poorly paid people who farm, pick, pack, and assemble these ‘manufactured foods’ though. The idea that this food magically comes into existence sans any human involvement is disturbing. Clever idea for a novel, though.
“Eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches is antisocial—not just isolated from social interaction, but an anti-society, a physical incarnation of consumption of time, alone”, Chris Mohney on PB&J sandwiches as part of Serious Eats ‘comfort food’ series and a countermand to the theory that comfort eating is about social connection.
What we eat during a plague in the NYT and, related, potatoes, the Polish companion in times of hardship and war.
On the power of feeding the person who fed you. I have always believed that anyone writing about food should experience what it is like to be hand-fed. You’ll find it uncomfortable at first and deeply awkward as you negotiate an act that is collaborative but can also feel disempowering, but eventually, the feeder and the fed will establish a rhythm.
Here’s Roni Caryn Rabin on the dignity of careful hand feeding by hand in dementia.
How do our senses interact when we eat; and harnessing food psychology for profit- or not?
"I have MS; this is what it is like to be hand-fed", writes Elizabeth Jameson.
And Bryn Nelson on what it is like to have dysphagia and “the desperation, even—that otherwise healthy people with dysphagia have to taste pizza, a doughnut or another reminder of a once-normal life.” The resourcefulness of patients, carers, and the professionals helping them is astonishing, especially when it comes to the social aspects of eating and working around the pain of loss. Sometimes, memories of comfort in food feel like all we are left with, and with skilled help, we can make this more palatable.
Table Lessons, an interview with Leah Chase is profoundly moving.”Of all seasons, autumn’s food is mostly about memory. As the leaves turn and the days shorten, we find ourselves craving hearty fare and local ingredients, longing for family recipes and traditions of exactly the kind Chase has served in full today. And so I ask Chase, herself a tradition and now deep into the autumn of her own life if there are particular foods that continue to compel and resonate with her emotionally.”
Jim Shahin on the power of a hoagie in the face of cancer treatment.
“Longing was not a feeling I could afford to have,” writes Melissa Chadburn about the food of her youth, poverty, and the siege mentality that it can cause.
Pippa Goldschmidt makes latkes for her dying grandmother, and her recipe worked after years of failed attempts. Her grandmother’s reaction wasn’t quite what she expected.
“The museum of how it used to be and how it always was is hard to maintain,” writes Shukla in ‘The Time Machine. His words make me hold my breath.
In 'American Taco', José R Ralat writes about what he calls 'the Abuelita Principle', which encodes what is deemed authentic Mexican food because everyone has an abuelita who prepares Mexican food 'as it should be prepared'. This, he argues, submerges a "kinetic and expansive cuisine" in a mire of nostalgia.