What constitutes comfort food which, to me, is any food that takes you back to the most blissful and secure moments of your childhood, varies widely from one person to another. For Proust, in Remembrance of Things Past , it was the madeleine, a tiny, rich, shell-shaped cake I still yearn to try someday. My personal comfort food isn't so high-falutin . If it isn t bagels or cinnamon bread or any form whatsoever of dark chocolate that I crave an addiction begun in childhood with my family s frequent indulgence in boxed, homemade creams from the Commodore on Broadway in Newburgh then it s meat. It s meals like my father s meatballs, tuna-noodle casserole, or turkey with all the trimmings.
Comfort food is about emotional rather than physical sustenance.
It's not that I need or even want to eat that turkey deluxe dinner at the diner for its nutritional value, it s that eating it takes me back through the parade of Thanksgivings and Christmases and summer nights on the Jersey shore, where it was always followed by chocolate parfait, that made up my childhood. Although comfort food always leaves me feeling at least somewhat happier than before I ate it, it does have its problems. I'm so hyperaware of its passage through my digestive system for the next 24 hours, and all of the carcinogenic and unethical ramifications of what I ve done, that I end up feeling as guilty for my backsliding into meat-eating as if I owned an entire closetful of mink coats. But sometimes I can t help it. Sometimes I need to ingest the foods of my past, whatever their ingredients.