From bananas to buttermilk, hard times mean comfort food
For some of us, stressful times inspire a craving for the comfort foods of our youth. When word first spread widely in March about the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself taking refuge in chicken-noodle soup and vanilla ice cream.
Answering those calls for comfort can lead to what’s been labeled “the quarantine 15” — that extra 15 pounds our munchies may produce. While I poured on the chocolate sauce, I started thinking about comfort foods of yore.
Snacking, Elvis style
For Elvis Presley-philes, good old soggy August recalls not only the singer’s death on Aug. 16, 1977, but also the month in 1956 when he and bandmates Scotty Moore and Bill Black toured Florida, crisscrossing the state to concert dates in un-air-conditioned venues such as Orlando’s Municipal Auditorium (Aug. 8), Daytona Beach’s Peabody Auditorium (Aug. 9) and Lakeland’s Polk Theater (Aug. 7).
As Bob Kealing outlines in his book “Elvis Ignited,” those tours marked a “turning point in American music history; it was the arrival of rock and roll.”
For comfort food, I suspect Elvis himself may have actually preferred meatloaf and mashed potatoes, but the snack most often linked to him is a simple sandwich of peanut butter and bananas on white-bread toast, which is then finished in a frying pan, grilled-cheese style. Debates have raged about whether the bananas should be sliced or mashed.
Comfort food means something different to different folks, the Sentinel’s Dorothy Chapman noted in a column in the summer of 1985, adding that for many of us, it means the food our mothers gave us when sick.
Chapman’s daughters hooted at her own memories of “milk toast,” she recalled, describing “heavily buttered and sugared toast drowning in hot milk.” For a younger generation, the thought of eggs scrambled with cheese or cubes of frozen Kool-Aid was much more appealing.
“Comfort food is not convenience food,” Chapman wrote. “It’s mothersknew-best food, such as pot roast and a mean gravy to mash into carrots and potatoes; buttered noodles; grits; poached and soft-boiled eggs; eggnog flecked with nutmeg; chicken soup; mashed potatoes; baked custard; oyster stew; and, lest you forget it, kids, that bowl of milk toast.”
Crumbling in
In an article about comfort foods born in times of discomfort, the website Gastro Obscura cites a dish called a “crumble-in” that’s related to Chapman’s milk toast. I can sure remember my grandfather relishing such a treat.
“The farmer families of Southern Appalachia in the 19th century didn’t have much, but if they had a cow and cornmeal, they had all the makings of crumble-in,” Gastro Obscura writer Luke Fater declares.
When they were famished, these mountain folks would dunk or entirely submerge a chunk of cornbread in a glass of milk — buttermilk for those who liked it, which would make the dish even more hearty. Maple syrup and honey were fine additions, and one might also take the savory route with a “sprinkle of black pepper on top of the rich, creamy snack.”
Discomfort-era comfort foods also included a cake with a surprise ingredient: a can of tomato soup.
Adding tomatoes to a sweet recipe seemed pretty wild and crazy in the Great Depression, as it might now, so community-cookbook recipes from the 1920s often titled the concoction “Mystery Cake,” noting the secret ingredient in the fine print.
Thus, a generation of children raised during the Depression may well have wolfed down birthday cake laced with condensed tomato soup. “It tastes nothing like tomato soup, I assure you,’ the food writer Marian Bull has noted, “but rather like a nice spice cake.”
The cake became all the rage, according to Gastro Obscura, and was eventually adopted in 1947 by Campbell’s itself, in a recipe that suggested a topping of cream-cheese frosting.
You can read more about comfort foods born in discomforting times at www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ historic-comfort-foods.