Yotam Ottolenghi on the joy of comfort food: ‘It’s home, family, memory – the combination of right dish, right time, right place’

When it comes to cooking and eating, what does “comfort” mean? At first glance, we might think of it as the food we make and eat at home after a tough day. It’s the food we make without thinking too much. It might also be the recipes we grew up on, which remind us of being a kid and being looked after. Or the food we eat too much of, unable to resist its ability to hit the spot.
Nurture, convenience, nostalgia, indulgence: agreeing on the notion of comfort food is fairly straightforward. What’s harder to pin down, though, is a definitive list of dishes that do the job. Mac’n’cheese, chicken ramen, schnitzel, sausages and mash, pizza, chicken noodle soup, lentils and rice, dal, dumplings: comfort food for many, certainly, but one person’s idea of cosy might be the next person’s idea of challenging. It’s so personal, so tied up with home, with family, with memory, even with the random idiosyncrasies of human taste. Trying to pin down a specific food memory is as slippery as a bowl of noodles.
Those noodles, for many of us, however souped up or reinvented they might be, will always feel nostalgic. It’s this – the ability of a dish to be nostalgic and novel all at once – that’s at the heart of my interpretation of comfort. In our new book, my colleagues and I offer dishes that are both comforting and creative, familiar yet somehow new. The book is also very much about the personal journeys we’ve been on, and all the stories these journeys contain. Between the four of us, we cover a fair bit of global ground. My food memories take in Italy and Germany (from my parents), Jerusalem and Amsterdam (where I lived and ate my body weight in croquettes), and London. Helen Goh’s stretch from China (from her grandparents) to Malaysia to Melbourne (where she was raised) to west London. Verena Lochmuller’s trodden ground takes in Germany, Scotland, New York (where she trained) and now London. The amount of tahini, aubergines, lemons, feta and olive oil that Tara Wigley has cooked with over the past 20 years, working at Ottolenghi and co-authoring the book Falastin, means she’s pretty good on the subject of Levantine food.
Looking at the ground we’ve trodden underlines the link between comfort food and immigration. When we move somewhere new, we do two things. We take on (and take in) the culture and cuisine of the place we’ve moved to, and we keep hold of and preserve the culture and cuisine of the place we’ve left.
Practicalities also play a part. We can’t lug around our childhood bedroom, or sofa, or that favourite spot we used to go to for a family picnic. If we are missing the chicken soup or lentils that our mother or father used to make for us when we needed a hug as a child, though, we can at least try to recreate these dishes.
For Helen, as it was for her mother, that means savoury steamed eggs. For Tara, the batch-cooker, it’s reaching for a ready-made container of roast aubergine, red pepper and tomato soup. I’d go for chicken meatballs, while Verena’s probably making a German-inspired potato salad.
And it doesn’t need to be a full dish; it can also be a sauce or condiment, whether that’s zhoug, nuoc cham, green tahini, chilli ginger sauce or aïoli. It’s often just a spoonful of one of those, alongside whatever else is being eaten, that is enough to give a feeling of familiarity.
Other ways to define comfort can also be about a certain type of food, for example, the inherently soothing nature of soup, say, or the face-planting comfort of a single ingredient such as potatoes, which hit the spot for many of us every time, whether as za’atar-topped roasts, Indonesian “home fries” or garlicky aligot. It might also be about the situation in which food is eaten: the comfort of sitting around with friends, or the very opposite – the comfort of quietly eating alone, with the world shut out. Very often, it’s about the combination of right food and right time and right place. That explains why an ice-cream on a hot day on a park bench can be as comforting as a glass of red wine and a plate of roast chicken inside on a cold day, when the kitchen windows are blocked out with steam.
Comfort eating is closely connected to the senses, too. Can anything beat the smell of a chicken roasting or a batch of brownie cookies baking and ready to come out of the oven? Or is it more about texture? The smooth, forgiving nature of mulligatawny, for instance, or the delightful crunch of fried things? It takes a mix of all these qualities to create the edible equivalent of a duck-down duvet or soothing hot bath.
For all the ways in which comfort food can be defined, the definition I have the least time for is that comfort food is somehow “naughty”, “a guilty pleasure”, the thing we eat “when no one is looking”. Of course, we all have days when we could indulge less, but the labelling of certain foods as good/virtuous and others as bad/comforting plays very little role in my idea of comfort food. We may feel as comforted by pastries as we do by salads. You could even argue that there is a biological reason some dishes are particularly comforting at certain times. When we’re stressed, we go into “fight”, “flight” or “feed” mode. And once we have escaped danger, we experience a rush of cortisol that craves, in particular, sugar. So it makes sense, really, to replenish as fast as possible the energy that has been used to fight or flee from whatever stressed or triggered us. Moreover, our senses are particularly heightened at this time, so a chocolate bar (or Helen’s ripple fridge cake) tastes even sweeter, even better, than it would have done had we not been stressed in the first place. For many, food is simply a way to show we care. This happens daily – every time we cook supper for someone – but it’s also often at the heart of special occasions, when a special meal is prepared on Valentine’s Day, for example, or a cake is baked for a birthday, or for solace or a show of support. For me, there’s possibly nothing more comforting and consoling than matzo ball soup, handed to me in a great big bowl by someone who cares that I’m sad.
What makes food comforting can be about where and how we eat, why we eat and who we eat with, as much as about what we’re eating in the first place. Something to think about, if you like, as you choose the recipes to try out and make your own. I hope the eight here bring you comfort, in whatever form that may come.