Comfort Food Rice Salads. Ahhhhhhh!
One with caramelized roasted winter squash; the other with pan bagnat flavors folded in. Rice salads, using risotto logic.
I’M NOT AN EXPERT ON COMFORT FOOD, but I didn’t let that stop me from writing an entire book about it (The Comfort Food Diaries) almost a decade ago.
It was “about” comfort food in the same way this newsletter is “about” salad. Which is to say, not exactly and sometimes only nominally.
But it turned out to be the perfect freezer case in which to store my heart and brain while I floated around the country, writing, rending my garments, shaking my fist at the sky, and pretending to be a fully conscious human rather than an emotional zombie.
And from my detached vantage point at the time, the American concept of “comfort food” seemed like it was designed for zombies like me:
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.
Back then, I was desperately, dorkily trying to find a way to live in a world that had ejected me on practically every level and in every department. But I also had a book contract so I did in fact have to spend a lot of time thinking about, consuming, studying, and writing about comfort food. It was a great way to avoid looking too closely at my disastrous life at the time.
A little request:
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And I wondered if maybe distraction was comfort food’s purpose? Eat a giant pudding, watch your divorce or your crazy family disappear: poof! But I stayed uncomfortable for years, anyway, until I finally figured out that people love you or they don’t. The rest is noise.
