Can Salad Be Comfort Food?

We're glad you asked. Plus, a velvety, creamy (but cream-less) root-vegetable soup.

REGULAR READERS OF THE DEPARTMENT OF SALAD may or may not know that I am an amateur expert on the topic of comfort food.

But even after writing an entire book about comfort food (or, rather, a book that was about comfort food in much the same way this newsletter is about salad—which is to say allegedly), I decided for a long time that there might actually be no such thing. Meaning comfort food, not salad. Salad is one of the few remaining real things we have to cling to in this preposterous world.

As I discussed in my book, comfort food—which is described in the Oxford English Dictionary as “food that provides consolation or a feeling of wellbeing, typically any with a high sugar or other carbohydrate content and associated with childhood or home-cooking”— is an extremely iffy concept that gets pushed upon us here in the United States in order to sell the illusory dreams of culinary comfort. Or, as I put it in my book:

In every city or town or village in the United States, down sterile fluorescent grocery store lanes, the standard dishes await you—so-called comfort foods, frozen behind glass, calling out to the wounded like easily available online drugs: meatloaf and mashed potatoes, pot pies, tuna-noodle casseroles, giant lasagnas to serve a crowd, single man-size bowls of chili. Iconic dishes fueled by the idea that your mother used to make them for you at home. Or, at the very least, that someone's mother, somewhere, made them for her family, and it soothed them.

Purchase this processed food memory, thaw it out, heat it up, stuff it down your pie hole, and you'll feel better. And if you don't feel better, well, you can just buy some more. But true comfort food is a much more complicated concept.

The problem with both that dictionary definition and the comfort food marketing machine is that we are all extremely different animals, including (and maybe especially) when it comes to the foods that pacify us. When I was a kid, I hated meatloaf. It made me despondent. My exposure was limited to the hard sheet-cake squares of ground beef served in my elementary school cafeteria and the version made by my late mother, who was an excellent cook but happened to be bad at meatloaf. I avoided it for the first 30 years of my life.

It’s hard to believe something so velvety and soothing comes from such scruffy ingredients. The parsnip soup in this photo has been in the fridge, ready for re-heating, so it’s particularly thick.

I later tried it again at one of those 1990s NYC restaurants dedicated to the idea of feeding you “homey” food even though home for many of us meant cramped, with a view of a dim alley, and a kitchen the size of the back of a minivan. This atmospheric meatloaf was delicious, so I began to make my own version once I moved to Chicago, where they have real kitchens.

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But I know that meatloaf will never be my idea of comfort food. The name alone—it’s a loaf of meat—sealed that for me, even though I am not quite a vegetarian. Nor will a lot of other foods we’re trained to see as comforting. I’m not going to list them or dwell on them here, because my feeling will always be: To each his own! Food, art, hats, music, cars, haircuts, human beings—we all have different tastes in everything.

And I love that about us: our different wishes and dreams and desires and preferences are what make the world keep whirling and whirring on. I hope it keeps whirling on.

Don’t get your comfort food ideas from this catalogue.

All of which explains why I believe we should never allow the marketing department at Acme Foods determine how we think and feel about what we love to eat. The lovely comfort chime buried deep within each of us— and our lifelong quest to ring it? Isn’t it just a smaller version of the human search engine that drives us forward from minute to minute? Always seeking, never truly knowing anything, but also never giving up? Continuing to find humor and beauty in how ridiculous we all are, until the very end, when we can hopefully look back and be proud of the questions we asked and the attempts we made and the voyages we took.

Maybe! But what do I know? What do any of us know? And how lucky are we to be alive and wondering?

Anyway, I am personally very happy when people find solace in any form, even if it’s through tuna noodle casserole, which makes me incredibly sad (but again, I am glad you enjoy it). And obviously, after all these years I now believe in the idea of comfort food—just not in the idea that we’re all supposed to find solace in the canon of culturally prescribed comfort foods.

Dried cherries, roasted sweet potatoes, Honeycrisp apples, aged gouda, toasted walnuts!

A canon, by the way, that has apparently never ever included salad—which tells you everything you need to know. This, despite how soothing a cold, crisp iceberg wedge blanketed in blue cheese dressing can be, or how transportive the classic Cobb salad almost always is, especially when prepared by someone who truly loves salad, like we do.

But when I recently considered my own current comfort food yearnings—it used to be shrimp cocktail; for a long time it was Chinese dumplings—I was stunned to realize it had never been salad for me either, unless I’d forgotten something. I felt like such a hypocrite. I rationalized, assuming I’d simply eaten too much salad on an everyday basis all my life for it to make me feel any different from the way it always makes me feel. Which is alive!

But then I remembered that comfort food is probably supposed to make you feel a little less alive, slightly hypnotized and transported from this planet to a place where there are no sharp edges or loud voices or car horns or unkindness.

When I eat sweet potatoes with their peel, I wet them and shower with a lot of kosher salt, then bounce them around in the bowl for a few minutes. The dirt comes off more easily with a vegetable brush after doing so.

What I wanted, the dish I knew was guaranteed to mollify me, was my velvety root soup—parsnips, carrots, potatoes, simmered and blended with a bit of creamy blue cheese. It truly never fails me. So I’m offering that to you today.

But I never want to be without something deeply green, even on that cozy, quiet, soft planet. So I also decided to make a salad that would not only improve my state of mind—chlorophyll being the operative drug—but also be very good for me. And what I came up with is a kitchen-sink shaved collard salad, jam-packed with cozy things: roasted sweet potato nuggets, aged Gouda cheese, dried cherries, and Honeycrisp apple, all bathed in a maple-cider vinaigrette. It would be good to serve at both a happy winter dinner party or at a party celebrating an allegedly sad occasion, like a divorce or someone getting fired. It’s both comforting and merry.

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*RECIPE: Emily’s Velvety Parsnip Soup

Serves 4 or so

In terms of texture, this soup is easily adjusted to suit individual tastes. I like mine to be almost like pourable baby food but you might like it a bit soupier/thinner. So, after the vegetables have finished cooking in the stock, I’m going to ask you to remove 2 cups of from the pot and set it aside; you’ll use this to adjust the consistency as you process it in the blender.

• 2 tablespoons olive oil

• 1 tablespoon butter

• 1 medium yellow onion, chopped

• 1 big celery stalk, chopped, and some leaves

• Big pinch of Kosher salt and a few grinds of freshly ground black pepper

• 1 medium carrot, peeled and chopped

• 2 pounds parsnips, peeled, and diced (about 5 cups)

• 1 russet potatoes, peeled and cut into ½ inch cubes (about 1 heaping cup)

• 7 cups chicken stock (you can use vegetable stock if you’d like; I used Better Than Bouillon)

• ½ cup crumbled blue cheese, such as gorgonzola or roquefort, more for garnish if desired

• Pinch of cayenne

• 1 large bunch of chives, snipped with scissors or chopped, for garnish

1. In a large heavy bottomed pot, melt the butter with the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onions and celery and cook until the onions are translucent, about 5 minutes; season with a bit of salt and pepper.

2. Add the carrots, parsnips and potatoes to the pot and toss to coat with the butter and oil. Continue cooking, stirring occasionally, until the carrots and parsnips brighten in color and begin to soften a bit, about 5 minutes. Add the stock to the pot and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to a simmer and continue cooking until the vegetables are very tender. Remove two cups of the stock and set aside.

3. Carefully transfer the soup to a blender with the blue cheese and cayenne and process until very smooth and velvety.

4. Taste the soup and assess the texture; you may add some of the extra stock here to adjust.

5. Return the soup to the pot and slowly reheat, adding more of the stock if needed. Taste for salt and pepper. Serve very warm but not piping hot, topped with a lot of chives and/or a bit of crumbled blue cheese.

Velvety Parsnip Soup

1.14MB ∙ PDF file

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RECIPE: Comfort Collard Salad, with Roasted Sweet Potatoes, Apples, and Aged Gouda

Serves 4

A few things about this salad: How you serve it is up to you. I prefer adding large shavings of the aged gouda on top at the end—it gives you the best hits of flavor—but that version obscures all the other bright and delicious baubles included in this salad, so I didn’t include a photo. You can also roughly chop the cheese into small chunks, grate it, or grind it into pebbles in your mini food processor, which was my second favorite method and is featured in the photo above. Regarding the sweet potatoes, I like the chunks in small bites, but you could mix up the sizes if you wanted, to create both creamy bites with a bit of crunchy edges and some smaller crispier ones. If you do that, watch the oven closely and remove the smaller sweet potatoes before they burn!

BTW: I was going to use some old pickled red onion I had in my fridge, but I remembered a red-onion-taming technique that Colu Henry uses in a salad we featured here, so I’ve done that. And I also added pomegranate seeds in addition to the dried cherries—why not?—when I remembered how good they were in Jenny Rosenstrach’s kale salad. Both of those salads are included in this issue, which will come in handy during the holidays.

Note: The dressing recipe makes enough for one salad. If you like an extremely bathed salad, double it.

• 2 normal sized sweet potatoes (not those huge honking ones but also not peewees), unpeeled, scrubbed, and cut into bite-size (about ⅔-inch) cubes

• 1 tablespoon olive oil

• Kosher salt, freshly ground black pepper, pinch of cayenne

• ¼ red onion, very thinly sliced

• 2 tablespoons cider vinegar

• 2 bunches collards, or 12 big leaves, stems removed, leaves stacked and thinly sliced crosswise (I remove the bottom stem and some of the thicker stem within each leaf; you can also tear each side of the leaf away from the stem then stack and slice the leaf halves)

• Apple Cider Maple Vinaigrette (method below)

• Heaping ½ cup chopped toasted walnuts, more to taste—and more for garnish if you wish (here’s how to toast walnuts; their flavor is perfect here)

• 1 large Honeycrisp apple, cored and thinly sliced lengthwise (no need to peel)

• ⅔ cup roughly chopped dried cherries (dried cranberries would be fine here, but the cherries are such a treat; use the sweetened ones in both cases), more for garnish

• 1 handful herbs (parsley leaves, chopped dill, chopped basil; you decide)

• 4 ounces or so aged Gouda, shaved (my preference), finely chopped in a food processor, or grated

• Handful of pomegranate seeds, optional but sparky and lovely

Remove the thick stem from each collard leaf, including any thicker stalk within the leaf.

1. Preheat oven to 425°F (218°C)

2. In a big bowl, toss the cubed sweet potatoes with the olive oil to coat; season with salt and pepper and a good pinch of cayenne and toss again to evenly distribute. Spread out on two foil- or parchment-lined sheet pans and roast, turning the pieces over about halfway through, until the edges begin to darken and crisp a bit and the potatoes are quite tender, about 25 minutes total. Remove from often and cool completely.

3. While the sweet potatoes cool, place the red onions in a small bowl and toss with the cider vinegar and a pinch of salt. Set aside.

4. Place the shaved collards in a big bowl. Sprinkle with ½ teaspoon kosher salt then use your hands to toss and gently massage the salt into the leaves. Set aside for at least 10 minutes.

5. When ready to serve, toss the collards with a few tablespoons of the vinaigrette. Drain the red onions, discarding the liquid, and add them to the collards along with the sweet potatoes, walnuts, apples, dried cherries, herbs, about half the cheese, and a few more tablespoons of the dressing. Toss gently to combine. Taste for more dressing, salt and pepper. Transfer to a serving platter or shallow bowl and top with the remaining cheese shavings, the pomegranate seeds, and any walnuts or dried cherries you’d like to scatter on top, as well. If you have any extra dressing, serve that on the side. This salad is delicious as leftovers.

Apple Cider Maple Vinaigrette

• 3 tablespoons apple cider vinegar

• 2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice

• 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons extra virgin olive oil

• 2 teaspoons Dijon mustard

• 2 teaspoons maple syrup

• Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

In a jar with a tight-fitting lid, combine all ingredients except salt and pepper. Shake vigorously until well emulsified. Taste; season with salt and pepper; taste again and adjust.

Comfort Collard Salad, With Roasted Sweet Potatoes, Apples, And Aged Gouda

724KB ∙ PDF file

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🥬 🥬🥬 🥬That’s It! We’re done here! We’ll see you soon with a recipe for authentic Pfeffernüsse. I’m kidding—it’s going to be salad.

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