A Trip Down Comfort Food Lane

My sister is a Czarina of Tradition and Ritual. I remember about 20 years ago she chastised me after a Thanksgiving dinner about the choices I had made for the gargantuan repast. I had combed Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines, cobbling together the most unusual Thanksgiving feast for our family’s enjoyment. At that time I cooked the Thanksgiving meal for our immediate family, the grandparents, and Aunt Audrey and Uncle Russell. I don’t think I yet knew who Martha Stewart was, but with my eclectic menu, I was certainly treading on what would become that Grande Dame’s turf.

Sister Elizabeth, the Czarina I mentioned above, collared me and said, “Listen—we aren’t interested in the fancy stuffings, the fancy soups and sauces. I don’t want cream of anything soup served from a carved-out pumpkin, I don’t want chunks of this and that unknown stuff in the stuffing, and I want my cranberry sauce out of the can [you know with the visible ridges of the tin holding the gelatinous cranberries all together]. It’s what we know. It’s what I want!”
At the time I just assumed she wasn’t interested in trying new things. That wasn’t her point. Thanksgiving, to her, was supposed to be about comfort food, in her mind, food to soothe your soul, and reconnect you to other years of celebrating food and family.

Elizabeth, that dear Czarina of remembering our traditions and reactivating our rituals, was right. There are times when gastronomic adventures are exciting and fulfilling, and there are times when all you want is a trip down Comfort Food Lane. On the plane ride back to Amman last Saturday I realized that my whole trip to the United States had been arranged to see old friends—both the human ones and the gastronomic ones. In my 16 days of vacation (I can’t call it relaxing in the usual sense since I moved at a breakneck pace trying to see everyone I could possibly see to enjoy hugs and love!) I did not try a single new food thing. It was about reveling in that wonderful stability of same old, same old land. That same old, same old food is a familiar reward for having navigated the rough waves of our world, and maybe it is even emotional security. It is certainly perceived as a sense of continuity—same old, same old. On that plane ride back, I thought about the comfort foods in which I had indulged during that two-week stay, enjoying the pleasant associations of childhood, camaraderie, and wanderlust of nostalgia.

Why do we cherish our comfort foods so much? Why do we rely on them and need them so? Science attempts to explain our need for comfort food as a chemical reaction in the brain. The brain releases certain “feel good” hormones into the body to compensate for all the different negative feelings that overwhelm us in every day life, like fatigue, stress, illness or, my favorite, the “ickies.” But, I think there is a deeper connection to feelings and people’s need for comfort foods. After all, if it was just hormonally induced then we would all agree upon what is a comfort food and what is not. One person's comfort food is another person's dieting nemesis.

Selection and choice of comfort food is obviously a very personal thing, clearly more behavioral and cultural then chemical. Comfort foods are tied to positive times and places in our memories that remind of us safety, joy, warmth and well, the obvious—comfort. I made a list of the comfort foods I enjoyed during my whirlwind Cincinnati and New York tour, food which grounds me in my sense of self, and regales me of memories that summon images of love and safety and promise. I can tie each of these foods to many great memories in my life that caused them to become my comfort foods as well as the times in my life when I turned to them when I thought the world was not being kind to me. When I eat these foods they don't necessarily remind me of the events that allowed them to be come my precious comfort foods, but they do make my life a little easier and get me back to my sense of self. These feelings that control our lives are managed by the complex hormones in our brains. So maybe science does have a point with their theories.

Here is my trip down Comfort Food Lane:

Graeter’s Ice Cream—I have sampled ice creams on every trip I have ever enjoyed, and nowhere else in the world is the ice cream as magnificent as Cincinnati’s own Graeter’s. It might be that the butterfat content is especially high—yum—but it is also associated with celebrations for as long as I can remember. As a child, we only went there for the really big moments of life—like after a piano recital. In high school it became the ultimate place in which to skip school for a period or two (yes, I got caught once when Celia and I sneaked back to school, and had to go to detention that afternoon). My favorite flavor is the Mint Chocolate Chip, and if you have sampled Graeter’s, you know of their irregular-shaped flecks and chips and chunks and hunks of bittersweet chocolate in the velevety, minty landscape. When I turned 40, my sister tried to think of a super-special gift for me, and so she sprung for the shipment of containers of Graeter’s to me in New York—immediately I got how special of a gift and remembrance this was! This visit I enjoyed Graeter’s on more than one occasion— with all of my high school friends I saw—Sylvia, Doris, Shelley, and Kevin—all made sure we made a pilgrimage to Graeter’s. Time melts away, and it hardly feels like 25 years since we sneaked down Ferguson Road to gorge on the best ice cream in the world.

Skyline Chili—on more than one occasion, as I have landed at the Greater Cincinnati Airport, I have headed straight to Skyline Chili! This is the domain of the three-way! Get your mind out of the gutter—we are talking a layer of spaghetti, steaming Cincinnati-style chili, and a halo of cheddar cheese on top. In the 1940s a Macedonian immigrant family opened a chili parlor in Cincinnati, and Cincinnatians have been mad about this dish ever since. The chili is not about spicy heat like great Texas chili—it is about the engagement of spices like cumin and cinnamon and nutmeg that create a chili that is as addictive as it is marvelous. Everywhere I have lived I have searched in vain for replications of this chili, and along with my family and friends, this glorious dish brings me back to Cincinnati as often as possible.

White Castle Hamburgers—when I was a little boy, I had piano lessons on Saturday morning, and on the way home, my mother would stop at the White Castle to grab a sack of the cheap hamburgers. Not everyone loves them—that high school friend Celia called them “Death Burgers”(!) but when I stop at the drive-through to get a couple of them now (just one dollar for two) I sink my teeth into the steamed burgers with the sautéed onions and pickle, and remember those long-ago Saturdays of family lunches, and also remember the numerous times stopping at White Castle in the middle of high-school night explorations.

LaRosa’s Pizza—the story my mother told me was that she and my father stopped at Buddy LaRosa’s pizza joint the night of their wedding and he wished them well, and offered all the pizza they wanted in their first year of marriage. That story has never been substantiated, but maybe it was supposed to be some justification for the decades-long association we have had with this pizza place. As a 10th grader, falling in love with all things at Western Hills High School, the play cast just had to eat there every evening, just to solidify all the work we had done that afternoon on the play. I don’t know if the pizza is really great or not—hard to tell, since when I am there I think of the hundreds of meals enjoyed there, and the realization I was back at our pizza joint. The Czarina of Tradition and Ritual makes sure we eat there every week after church. This visit I called Mrs. Schneider, that music-maker and star-maker teacher in high school, to go out to eat and meet, and we decided on—where else, but La Rosa’s!

Sylvia’s Sauer Braten—In my childhood my favorite dish at our then-regular Sunday Dinner haunt was sauerbraten, a German dish, at Habig’s. A few years ago Habig’s closed, after about 70 years of business. I missed the tang of this marinated beef dish, and so my dear friend Sylvia set out to re-create the dish. Sylvia got a recipe from a fireman friend of my dad’s and created a miraculous facsimile of Habig’s dish, although she sweetly, and diplomatically, relayed that she couldn’t stand the way it made her house smell! How kind and wonderful of Sylvia during this vacation to make this dish again, as a Christmas gift to me, in spite of the vinegar, spices, and lemon smell that lingered in her home!

Aunt Dot’s Sweet Potatoes—About a dozen years ago Aunt Dot began inviting our family to Thanksgiving and Christmas meals, right around the time my sister married, and had another family’s meals to attend. Although we were often just a table of 5 or so, Aunt Dot created a memorable and tasty feast every visit. Over the years, I found that as soon as Aunt Dot would proffer the invitation for T’giving or Christmas, I began thinking how great her sweet potatoes were, and how important these family visits were. These were not perhaps the fanciest sweet potatoes, but fabulous, solid, and real—exactly the qualities in Aunt Dot I treasure so much.

Tony and Indian food—I have a friend Tony, and going on 25 years now, we get together twice a year. In between, the travails of life don’t allow for really much communication, but twice a year now he drives 100 miles to see me in Cincinnati, and we always go out for Indian food. He knows that my tradition-bound family doesn’t allow for much foreign food, and I don’t think his wife particularly enjoys the Indian grub, but when I think of Indian food in general, I think of those hours, semi-annually, when Tony and I put aside everything else and concentrate on what has bound us together for a quarter century. Pass the samosas please…

Cristina’s Spicy Cheese Dip—One of the nearest and dearest friends of mine in New York is Cristina, the Brazilian wonder who teaches Spanish at Hackley. An invitation to her home is always the most magical of times. Cristina offered to host a party for faculty friends from New York, so we could get together and relax in her new home. Cristina makes a dip, oh my, this wonderful hot, spicy cheesy dip, that she makes for nearly every party she hosts. Scooping up the decadent dip took me back to her other parties, other scenes of laughter and conviviality I have enjoyed in her two previous homes over the last 10 years. Cristina and her husband Luis are divine hosts—pampering the guests, and making you feel like prized royalty.

Rib-Eye Steak at the Ardsley Country Club—In 2005 I went through a rough patch of life, and friends Anne and Peter took me out to dinner every night for about 10 nights in a row. Their thought was that good food could always rouse your spirits, and trump the demons. Over the years, I enjoyed many fine meals at their club, and a symbol of their generosity was Anne or Peter saying, “I think you need a good steak.” Last week Anne and I enjoyed a lunch at the club, with two of the greatest former students we know, and I sunk my teeth into my first steak in six months. The room, the friends, the ambiance, the steak, all took me back to a time when caring friends helped me weather a storm.

So what new food memories do I have at KA? Well, my favorite meal here is the lasagna. That is the newest star in my gastronomic galaxy. We have it once in awhile, and the first time was that long-ago night on August 1, when the faculty all first met, and ate in a courtyard under the stars. It is like the Greek lasagna with a béchamel sauce, and it has all the makings of what we seek in memorable comfort food.

At Christmas every year, the dear Czarina of T&R gives me jars and cans and boxes of all the comfort foods I miss when away from Cincinnati. This year I decided to put them in my carry-on bag to New York. Okay—I forgot that even though they are not toiletries, they are still suspect to FAA regulations about liquids and such. Fortunately my father watched to see if I got through security satisfactorily, and took home the confiscated comfort foods. Of course I wasn’t happy about losing all those foods to bring back to Amman this January. But they will all be waiting for me when I make my food tour, home again, in April.