Gingery soba noodles may defy definition
Comfort food is hard to pin down. It’s as slippery as noodles, with any attempt to characterize it often countered by an exception. Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “the type of food that people eat when they are sad or worried, often sweet food or food that people ate as children.”
I connect with the nostalgia part and love sweet things, but I tend to reject the idea that comfort food must fill a sad- or worried-shaped hole.
To me, all food is comfort food: Do we ever set out to make food that discomforts? It’s true that the past year has seen a focus on food’s particular ability to provide solace amid so much uncertainty. Slippery though noodles can be, then, it’s interesting to ponder why noodles — so simple, so basic, so everyday — have such an ability to nurture, sustain and, indeed, comfort.
For all the ways to define comfort food, the dictionary definition is the one I’d push back on. Why is comfort food associated with sadness or some kind of lack or guilt? Why is the tub of ice cream we fall into on a Friday night seen as a substitute for the real hugs we’ve all been missing? Can’t we just love it because it’s delicious, easy and there?
I don’t like Champagne (no guilt!), but I do love this quote from Lily Bollinger, who is with Bollinger Champagnes: “I drink Champagne when I’m happy and when I’m sad.”
“Sometimes I drink it when I’m alone,” she said. “When I have company, I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I’m not hungry and drink it when I am. Otherwise, I never touch it — unless I’m thirsty.”
I feel the same way about food! I eat when I’m happy and when I’m sad. Sometimes I eat when I’m alone. When I have company, it’s a must. I snack when I’m peckish and feast when I have an appetite. Otherwise, I can go without — unless I’m hungry.
And when I want to easily make something from what I have in my cupboards, this kind of noodle dish, inspired by some Japanese ingredients I have in my cupboard, is what I prepare.
It ticks all the boxes. Sustaining, slippery noodles cooked in broth and eaten from a bowl with chopsticks or a spoon (or a slurp, if I am alone): tick, tick, tick, tick.
The chicken stock and fresh cilantro remind me of the food I was nurtured with as a kid and that I now pass on to my own children: tick. I can eat it alone or share it with friends, asking them, as I ladle out the broth, what their definition of comfort food is.