Chinese congee is comfort food.

C ongee is a humble dish, a way to cope when rice stores were low. Stretch the grain by adding too much water, cook it into a hearty porridge, and throw in bits and pieces of whatever leftovers are on hand.

These simple dishes born of necessity often become our most soulsatisfying: Think chicken noodle soup. When Joanne Chang was a child, her mother made her congee whenever she was ill.

“For me, it’s comfort food. It’s what made me feel good,” said Chang, now chef and co-owner of the Boston restaurant Myers + Chang, adding that her mother “would sit there and feed it to me, and I felt loved. And it was delicious.”

Congee is the stuff of home. And like the best recipes for home cooks, it rewards improvisation. Think of congee as a blank slate: Start with a ratio of 8 cups of water to 1 cup of short-grain rice. In her 2003 cookbook, “Essentials of Asian Cuisine,” Corrine Trang counsels against rinsing the rice before cooking to retain the starch that will be essential to creating a “soft velvety texture.” Bring the rice and water to a boil, and reduce the heat to maintain a steady simmer, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking, until the grains bloom and begin to shred. (Or, if you’re an Instant Pot fanatic, dump the water and rice into your cooker, select the 20-minute porridge setting and allow it to vent naturally.)

What you add next depends entirely on your mood and your proximity to a good Chinese market. Chopped pork and diced thousand-year egg are perhaps most popular. Trang suggests hard-boiling salted duck egg and serving that as a garnish, along with thousand-year egg and sliced omelet. Chang’s mother pan-fried canned tuna fish packed in oil: “It was salty and had a lot of umami . ... It gets a little crunchy-crispy.”

Drizzle a bit of good soy sauce and sesame oil, and add the crunch of fresh green onion, and you’ve got a belly-warming breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Congee is an excellent foil for the concentrated flavor of dried seafood too; consider an adapted version of Maggie Zhu’s from her “Omnivore’s Cookbook.”

Or, you could get more ambitious and try a recipe Chang invented for her restaurant. She was aiming for a dim sum dish that made good use of her nirvana chicken recipe, soy-braised thighs that are easy to replicate at home. We suggest you make a big batch of the chicken on Sunday, along with the crispy shallots; save the congee for a weeknight when humble food is all you can manage.