I’ve been thinking about comfort and I’ve been thinking about food. Whether this is the same as thinking about comfort food, I’m not sure.
The simple, immediate cause of these thoughts was that I’ve been hit by a hideous dose of flu, like being run over by an Ocado truck, scarcely able to get out of bed. I was looking to find comfort anywhere I could, and food seemed a better place than most.
Now the online Cambridge Dictionary definies comfort food as ‘the type of food that people eat when they are sad or worried, or food that people ate as children.' I suppose I was sad and I suppose I was worried, but mostly I felt like I was on another planet.
The BBC Good Food website gives examples of comfort food that include Beef enchiladas, Chicken chashu shoyu ramen, and Three-cheese meatball lasagna Someone’s been at the cooking sherry, right? These things were not going to comfort me. But I thought I’d better eat something. I tried a bowl ofmuesli – it was like eating a mix of gravel and sawdust.
I had a clementine which was OK but it didn’t taste much like a clementine usually tastes. I thought about making a cheese sandwich, a generally reliable source of comfort, but it was far too much trouble.
Now, if I’d been craving the food of my actual childhood this would have meant a yearning for tripe and onions, liver and onions, and Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie in a tin. None of these would have brought me any comfort whatsoever in my flu-ridden state.
Nevertheless it so happened that I had a can of Heinz oxtail soup stashed in the cupboard. Now one way or another, I pretty much grew up on oxtail soup (it was only many years later that I saw an actual ox’s tail) and I’d bought it recently, experimentally to see if it had any Proustian resonances. This seemed like the moment to crack in open.
Reader, it did not have any Proustian resonances. I know my taste buds were all over the place but it was pretty dreadful – and adding lemon, cream and Worcestershire sauce was only a slight help. Of course if I hadn’t had the flu it might have been different but I suspect not so very different. I became philosophical.
I asked myself, as I have before; if food doesn’t bring you comfort why would you bother to eat it in the first place? Of course you could say if you’re starving you’ll eat anything but in that case anything will bring you comfort.
Of course sometimes you make the mistake of going to a bad restaurant, but in those circumstances you weren’t choosing discomfort. You had it forced upon you. It wasn’t what you hoped for. Or perhaps it was something you made yourself and the recipe went wrong because you overestimated your culinary skills. You damn fool. So there may be all kinds of reasons why food makes you uncomfortable.
There is also the question, which I’m still wrestling with, of whether comfort is the same thing as pleasure, and I’m edging towards saying not. I love oysters, I love steak tartar, I love octopus. These things certainly bring me great pleasure but I’m not sure they bring me comfort. Certainly they’d have been no help at all during my hideous bout of flu.
You know what worked best – a mug of hot Rose’s lime juice and two Ibuprofens: a very minor, but in the circumstances, a very significant coming together of comfort and pleasure.
Also it must be said that for much of my incapacity, the inamorata did her very best bedside duties. Thanks, young Caroline.
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