Comfort Food

-Foodie
Noun
-Informal, a person with a keen interest in food and cookery

I'm a self admitted foodie, I love to cook and I love to eat and try new things, but after a week of trying some new and interesting foods from various Caribbean cultures, I've come back home to a big bowl of noodle soup. This got me wondering, as I looked back to past events in my life both happy and sad, I discovered a pattern, I would almost always end up going back to a staple like noodle soup. At this point i realized that for me, Noodle soup is a comfort food for me, something warm and nourishing that i could fall back on and provide me come respite from the bustles of daily life. Comfort food then is something every culture and every group of people has, whether it be national or regional within a state. But not everything I think can be comfort food, my definition of something that is a comfort food has 4 main parts.


1. It must be warm or hot - Comfort food should be something one can fall back on after a long days work, something cold will never provide the calming experience and soothing nature something nice and hot can. Would you rather return after a long winters walk to a bowl of soup or a bowl of ice cream?

2. It must be simple - Comfort food can not be something that takes hours to prepare and require a day of shopping to find all the ingredients for. It should be simple and nourishing that anyone should be able to make and not require a team professionally trained chefs to prepare.

3. It must be normally served in decent portions - Comfort food isn't something that is one bite and go, it should be something that you would sit down to and savour for a few minutes or even hours with mates or family. It should not be bite sized but rather hearty like a big bowl of mash or like for me, a big bowl of noodle-y goodness.

4. It must be something you grew up with - The reason comfort food is called as such is because it reminds the eater of a simpler, more carefree time like childhood. It should not be something you randomly pick up in your 20s or 30s but something your mom or grandma made when you were young and you would eagerly sit down to after school or for dinner.


So what is comfort food for me? As I mentioned earlier, a bowl of noodle soup is pure comfort food for me, it meets all my criteria and is something I will likely enjoy eating for many many years to come. But comfort food varies widely from nation to nation and even within regions in a nation as the United States shows.

The American South - When I think of southern comfort, I picture collard greens, fried chicken, warm biscuits and the like. Sure it might sound cliché but growing up in Virginia has shown me some truth to this.

The Southwest - I think the epitome of comfort food in the Southwest would be something hearty, a testament to the original settlers in the region from ranchers to farmers who took the dry climate and made it their own. Chili, then would be my pick for this region.

But some foods probably transcend all boundaries in the US, things like mashed potatoes, mac n' cheese and probably most popular and widely accepted, chicken noodle soup - that bowl of savoury goodness that can cure almost anything from a cold to a bad day at school.

My knowledge of comfort food outside of the United States unfortunately is limited. In Southeast and East Asia Things like Noodle soup and congee or rice porridge in one form or another probably dominate the comfort food scene. They essentially are peasant foods, something everyone can enjoy regardless of wealth. Europe is even more of a mystery for me, the highly variable cultures in the continent foster so many cultures that it's a mosaic of food. Russia's chicken noodle soup then maybe is borscht, the beet soup with the distinctive bright purple hue and in England, fish and chips could be considered a food everyone can fall back on. But I'm never sure of any of these, only people form these places themselves can make a definite statement as to what is and what is not comfort food for them. the most mysterious regions though for me would be Latin and South America, Africa and the Middle East. While I enjoy foods from across the world, I figure that the stuff I get at the local Mexican or Indian place isn't exactly as authentic as it should be.


As I love to know more about the world we all live on, I would like to ask a question to anyone who is reading this blog-

Wherever you are from, whether it be the U.S. or internationally, what is your comfort food?
What is your chicken noodle soup or mac n' cheese?

Also, if my assumptions about a regions comfort foods are incorrect in your mind, please do correct me. I'd rather be wrong and then learn something new than forever be under an incorrect assumption about one of a culture's most important aspects, their food.

Yum.