Comfort Food—To each his/her own (3/26/2013)

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?