To Comfort Food

For Keith, it’s Hungarian Goulash. Fork-tender braised beef in a thick onion and paprika flavored gravy poured over homemade noodles and served with spoonfuls of sour cream. When he first told me about this, I imaged egg noodles and the word “goulash” sounded  mushy. I could not have been more wrong. His mom makes this and it is sublime. She learned it as a young mother in California, a Michigan transplant to tiny Half Moon Bay. No family there. They become friends with Hungarians, like family really. She learned how to make the noodles, pressed through a sieve. This is the kind of cooking one can only learn by standing next to another person, watching how the texture of the dough changes, spending all the time at the stove, not some video version edited down to 9 minutes. They spent the hours together. The steam on their faces. Decades later, back in Michigan, she still takes out the recipe card before she cooks. But she knows it by heart.

Comfort foods connect to us to something both larger and more simple than the life we have to live today. Today, we have to pay a gas bill March for the bitter cold February we just survived, though it feels like someone should pay us as a reward for making it through. Today, we make an appointment with a doctor for that feeling--not a pain exactly, not an ache, but certainly it’s not right--in our neck. It’s not so bad if we sleep with just the right combinations of pillows and sit in just the right chair with the computer angled at just the right 47 degrees, but really? Do we have to live with this kind of precision? 

Our motto becomes “could be worse” and we end conversations with phrases like, “But hey, I’m not complaining” because we know one day it will get worse. Today we write the check and take an Advil. Today is not that day.

But we need a little something to take the edge off, something to sink into. Something to eat that makes us feel not just that we are home but that we are safe. 

For me, it’s buttered cinnamon toast. I had a lot of unexplained fevers as a kid and because they never knew what caused them, there was little to do but wait for them to pass. Mom would bring me a small plate with 4 triangles of toast, buttered before toasted in the oven so that the butter would sink down into thick squares dotting the bread. Cinnamon sugar all the way to the edges.