I’ve thinking lately about comfort food, primarily because I’m
putting together a panel on the topic for a conference (American Folklore
Society in Providence, RI in Oct., 2013). That got me looking at scholarship on
the subject, but it also got me thinking about what comfort food is. The Oxford
English Dictionary defines it rather obviously as “food that comforts or offers
solace,” but that doesn’t offer any clues as to what foods those are, how they
work, and why we might need comforting anyway.
The last question became obvious over a few days when I visited
my 89-year-old father. Although he is in remarkably good health and looks 75 or
younger, he is recovering from pneumonia and suddenly feeling the aging
process. I usually cook for him when I visit, and these are usually foods from
his Appalachian childhood—hominy, grits, beans, greens. He now tends to add
some chunks of canned salmon, canned applesauce, and ketchup to everything he
eats, which is actually very healthy, but has a disconcerting effect on the
aesthetics of the meal for the rest of us. Because of an uncomfortable family
situation (which I won’t go into here, but could use as the basis for numerous
blogs and books as well as perhaps, crimes), I didn’t cook for him this time.
Instead, we went out to eat or I brought in food. It was obviously not the
same. He wanted the comfort of familiar foods and familiar routines.
Instead, he took what comfort he could in going to restaurants
that held memories for him, that allowed him to be nostalgic about his own
history and about his wife, my mother, who died three years ago. Some of these
were more successful than others in terms of offering solace and emotional
sustenance. For example, we went to a Vietnamese restaurant, in honor of his
having worked in Saigon for 4 years up until the “end” of the war in 1975. I
stayed with him there for a semester of college, so I chose a café specializing
in noodle soups (pho) that reminded me of the inexpensive but delicious meals I
consumed in market places and sidewalk vendor stands. For me, these were
comfort foods, reminding me of youthful adventures as well as special times
with my father (my mother and siblings had lived in Bangkok rather than Saigon
for safety reasons). My father, however, did not remember those years. What he
did remember was frequenting a different restaurant in the Vietnamese enclave
of shops (the Eden Center in Falls Church, VA). That restaurant had belonged to
a Vietnamese refugee whom he had known in Saigon and then helped get
established in the US. That restaurant, the Four Seasons, had since moved to
another part of town, but he brought it up repeatedly as where he had wanted to
go. He used to take my mother there on Sunday afternoons, and he liked seeing
the “fruits” of his own generosity and friendship to the restaurant owner.
Plus, I think he sometimes got a discount! The point, though, was that the food
itself seemed to hold no comfort for him; it was the place that would have
comforted. He enjoyed the meal, especially since he got to visit with my
college age daughter, but it didn’t “nourish” him emotionally as it did me.
This got me thinking more about comfort foods, though, and how
each of us have our own memories, our own histories, and our own tastes that
make some foods comforting. When I asked my own children (now in the twenties)
what foods they considered comfort foods, one responded with a list of items
(grits and hash browns that I usually made for her; potato salad that her
grandmother made), while another said “anything that Meema made.” He couldn’t
think of anything specific until I reminded him of an essay he had written in
high school about his grandmother making pancakes in any shape requested,
including pterodactyls. It was the shapes, not the pancakes, themselves that he
remembered fondly and made him nostalgic for the long summer days spent with
his grandparents. My own comfort foods would not fit the usual American
expectations of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, etc, but
reflect my own multicultural history of growing up in the American South and
Appalachian mountains, and far east and southeast Asia—hominy, cornbread,
Korean bulgogi and kimchi. Also, I realized that more recent events had
introduced foods that to me represented comfort, or at least memories that
nurtured and soothed—soda bread from a year in Northern Ireland, flan from a
year in Spain, corn casserole from decades in the American Midwest.
So what does this tell us about comfort food? It’s different for
each of us. We all have different pasts as well as different needs for comfort.
My comfort foods give me a sense of continuity with the numerous homes I have
had and people I have known. They remind me of good times, or at least, times
that made a mark on me in some way, and that are now a part of my history. And
I realize that I need them when I feel dislocated somehow and distanced from
those places and people. They comfort me in reminding me that I am part of
things larger than myself and that my life has been rich and full. And that
last adjective can be taken literally and metaphorically.
One last question—actually, several: Why do we (Americans)
usually think of comfort food as being unhealthy, loaded with carbohydrates,
fats and sugar? And why is only some food comforting? Why not all of it?
