Comfort food - someone else's thoughts - a sort of 'A word from ...'

"Have we lost recipes, or just the simple tradition of comforting each other?"

Hattie Garlick

Talking of Food

This is really just a place marker. A bit depressing for me personally because I found this whilst researching for my chicken soup post which I am about to write.

Not only does this young lady talk about chicken soup but she also talks about comfort food and recipe books - in a much more literate and thoughtful way than ever I could.

To give you a taste, here are a few of her comments, but I do recommend that you read the whole article. I haven't come across her blog before, but I will have a further look now. And I find that she is just an occasional contributor to the Talking Food Website.

"I do a count. I have 39 cookbooks. Let’s say each one contains 100 recipes. I have, in my possession, a total of 3,900 different recipes, covering 19 different regimes, rages and regions. But not a single recipe that’s been passed down through my family. Unless, that is, you count eggy bread. Is all this food escapism a bit... inauthentic, I begin to wonder? Am I like a package tourist, taking snaps in front of all the key monuments, but missing something more profound?"

"Do we not cook food that comforts ourselves and others anymore? And if not, why not? When I cook for others, I cook to excite, to experiment, to celebrate, occasionally to show off. I cook for any number of different alliterative verbs but I rarely cook simply to comfort."

"as I researched, I realised that almost every culture under the sun has their own chicken soup recipe. With the addition of noodles in Thailand, chipotle in Mexico, okra in West Africa, garlic in France... It looks a little different wherever you taste it but wherever you go in the world, chicken soup counts among the definitive comfort foods."

At the end of her article she decides to cook a different version of chicken soup each month and invite ten guests who are in need of comfort. So when I went to investigate her other posts I found that she has indeed embarked on this project and that she had different posts on different chicken soups. You can find the list and the posts here.