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The Intimacy of Comfort Food
It’s not about starch or cream
In itself, the phrase comfort food evokes a splendid sense of fullness. The soft roundness of the o’s are not unlike that of my pasta-filled belly after a meal that most certainly soothed anything ailing me. The fortifying consonants on either side of each word serve as support to hold together the phrase’s bulbous innards, cradling them as if they were a baguette still warm from the oven.
The dishes that adorned my family’s table growing up were often either alarmingly Americana, such as frozen fish sticks and meatloaf (both empty plates identical in their remnants of Heinz ketchup) or Italian-inspired dishes, such as spaghetti bolognese and turkey tetrazzini. To my memory, baked pastas were the most plentiful: a warm glass pan of red sauce-rimmed noodles, like rigatoni or casarecce, with a bubbling cheesy top. My mom’s partner, Mike, would often cook this dish and in my mind he was the aficionado for all things Italian cooking. He would set down the pasta, enough to feed an NFL football team, and bellow, “Tutto benne! Mangia!”
What my parents served me was how I defined comfort in my little brain as a child. Much like formation of an attachment style, my appetite for certain foods very closely resembled that of my caretakers. Though it, luckily, has changed as I’ve grown: My mother will gag…
