Comfort Food

Meanings and Memories

Michael Owen Jones, Lucy, Long, Michael Owen Jones, Lucy M. Long

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781496810861
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

With contributions by Barbara Banks, Sheila Bock, Susan Eleuterio, Jillian Gould, Phillis Humphries, Michael Owen Jones, Alicia Kristen, William G. Lockwood, Yvonne R. Lockwood, Lucy M. Long, LuAnne Roth, Rachelle H. Saltzman, Charlene Smith, Annie Tucker, and Diane Tye Comfort Food explores this concept with examples taken from Atlantic Canadians, Indonesians, the English in Britain, and various ethnic, regional, and religious populations as well as rural and urban residents in the United States. This volume includes studies of particular edibles and the ways in which they comfort or in some instances cause discomfort. The contributors focus on items ranging from bologna to chocolate, including sweet and savory puddings, fried bread with an egg in the center, dairy products, fried rice, cafeteria fare, sugary fried dough, soul food, and others.Several essays consider comfort food in the context of cookbooks, films, blogs, literature, marketing, and tourism. Of course what heartens one person might put off another, so the collection also includes takes on victuals that prove problematic. All this fare is then related to identity, family, community, nationality, ethnicity, class, sense of place, tradition, stress, health, discomfort, guilt, betrayal, and loss, contributing to and deepening our understanding of comfort food.This book offers a foundation for further appreciation of comfort food. As a subject of study, the comfort food is relevant to a number of disciplines, most obviously food studies, folkloristics, and anthropology, but also American studies, cultural studies, global and international studies, tourism, marketing, and public health.

Comfort (and Discomfort) Food: Social Surrogacy and Embodied Memory in Real and Reel Life

LuAnne Roth

It is evident that nothing is simple in memories connected with food.

—Fabio Parasecoli

As suggested by the existence at the 2013 American Folklore Society of two panels on the topic of comfort food, folklorists are acutely aware that, while “under the cloak of the mundane and the quotidian,” food is much more than a collection of nutrients.¹ Food assumes social and symbolic functions in people’s lives and hides powerful meanings and structures. What we eat has enormous significance as a medium for personal and collective identity creation and maintenance. Five decades ago, psychoanalyst Charlotte Babcock wrote that food is used to relieve anxiety (e.g., eating when upset; clinging to old food habits because they are comforting); to deny one’s needs (e.g., dieting or fasting); to gain acceptance and security; or to influence others (e.g., to manipulate and control children), and much research on comfort food still focuses on these emotional uses of food.² The term “comfort food” was first recorded in 1977. According to Wikipedia, the fountain of folk knowledge, comfort food is “traditionally eaten food (which often provides a nostalgic or sentimental feeling to the person eating it) or simply provides the consumer an easy-to-digest meal—soft in consistency and rich in calories, nutrients, or both. The nostalgic element held by most comfort food may be specific to either the individual or a specific culture.”³

This definition leaves much unanswered. Many people intuitively think they understand what constitutes comfort food. How complicated can it be? Yet there are actually many complexities, contingencies, and idiosyncrasies at play when individuals reach for food identified as comforting. Comfort food, therefore, is one of those nebulous terms that leads to much hypothesizing by the folk.⁴ If comfort foods “positively pique emotions” and “relieve negative psychological effects,”⁵ then I am particularly interested in the role memory plays in these functions and how this becomes relevant to discomfort foods as well. By comparing the results of social science and humanities research, essays from students of my foodways classes and, finally, key scenes from ethnically diverse “food films,”⁶ I support the contention that comfort food functions as a form of social surrogacy, and I discuss the technical mechanisms by which filmmakers, despite the limitations of the cinematic medium, manage to call upon organoleptic properties (flavor, smell, mouthfeel) to evoke “the remembering subject.”⁷ In other words, film works within its confines to visually and auditorally depict memories ordinarily recalled through a range of other senses, such as taste, smell, and mouthfeel.

American studies scholar Warren Belasco encourages reflection on foods laden with autobiographical, emotional, and symbolic meaning by building upon the concept of the madeleine—the tiny, tea-soaked cookie that inspired seven volumes of French novelist Marcel Proust’s classic, Remembrance of Things Past.⁸ Proust’s protagonist Swann dips the tiny cookie into his tea and experiences something unexpected and perhaps magical.

No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a previous essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savors, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Where did it come from? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it? …

And suddenly the memory returned. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray, … my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of lime-flower tea. And once I had recognized the taste of the … madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers … immediately the old grey house … rose up like the scenery of a theater to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents; and with the house the town … the Square, where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on color and distinctive shape, that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the waterlilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, towns and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.⁹

Upon such intense joy, the protagonist seeks the origin of his profound emotion in the cookie itself, but eventually concludes that the source is hidden elsewhere (perhaps in his very soul).¹⁰

He realizes something about the process of remembering: that it involves searching as well as creating—that is, not only retrieving pieces of the past triggered by a present sensation, such as taste or smell, but actually recreating the memory in that present moment.¹¹

Since the rush of emotion and memory is triggered by the organoleptic properties of taste and mouthfeel, Proust’s madeleine nicely captures food’s power to evoke the deepest of memories and begs the question: How does food manage to hold such power?¹² Belasco offers an exercise called “Madeleines: We Are What We Ate.” Intended to get students to think about their own equivalent of Proust’s madeleine, the exercise asks students to imagine tasting it and then to begin writing, describing the food as well as the associations, images, and memories that it conjures: “Is it positive, negative, or somewhere in between (bittersweet)? Is it a comfort food or a discomfort food? A medium for conflict or reunion? Is it homemade or commercial? Is it a demographic ‘marker’ of ethnicity, region, generation, gender, religion, or class? Does eating this food make you part of a group? Exclude you from other groups?”¹³

For three semesters (2010–2013), I assigned this exercise to undergraduate students taking a food and culture class I teach at the University of Missouri. Their ninety responses are as varied as the students themselves, but they seem to support an association between madeleines and comfort food, as the following examples illustrate (emphasis added).

Grandma’s homemade chicken and noodles. This was served at all the holidays in our family since I was a kid. It is like chicken and dumplings but with homemade egg noodles. It reminds me of all the wonderful times I have spent with my family. Everyone wants to take the leftovers home, if there is [sic] any! The holidays would not be the same without it. The year my grandpa passed away is the only time grandma wasn’t going to make it, so the grandkids came and she showed us how so we can always have it. (Female from central Missouri, Spring 2013)

My grandmother’s kabobs. Persian food is rare in Texas, so I am sure one can imagine how rare it must be in Missouri. Altogether, even if there were 1,000 Persian restaurants in this town of Columbia, no one would make kabobs koobideh like my grandmother Jaleh Lalzalipour. She grills the meat, and shapes the kabobs into planks around the roasting sticks. She has a homemade charcoal grill in the backyard; wooden and old. She rotates the beef kebobs over and over. When she returns into the house with the kabobs, they are nestled together under a circular shape of flat bread on a plate. She enters with the kabobs, but when she walks in it fills the house with the nostalgic aroma. (Female from Texas, Spring 2013)

My mom’s homemade stove-top potatoes with onions. She’s made them my whole life and my whole family begs for them all the time. It reminds me of home and my family and no one can make them like her. My mom makes fried potatoes for us and has since I was little.… It’s not a complicated dish to make, but we always beg for them at every holiday or dinner she makes when people come over.… They just remind me of home and especially of eating dinner with my sisters and mom while we joke and talked about our days at school. I think it’s indicative of our class and nationality—it’s simple, inexpensive and very American in that it’s fried potatoes. It definitely makes me feel like part of a group—my family. (Female from Chicago, Spring 2013)

My madeleine is rice pudding for the reason that my mom would stir the rice and the milk for hours until she got the consistency only she could judge. I have a lot of memories of the kitchen stool pulled up to the stove and my dad, sister, and I taking turns stirring the pudding. (Male from Chicago, Spring 2013)

I would have to say my madeleine is plátanos fritos (ripe, sweet plantains fried and salted) for breakfast. By the time I was born, both of my biological grandfathers had passed away and my maternal grandmother had been remarried to Desmond Daniels, a black Panamanian man who I came to know as Pappy or Grandpa. When I was a little girl, I was scared of Pappy. A former opera singer, he had a loud, booming voice, and his version of joking was to make scary (but altogether affectionate) faces and voices. However, I remember the first time we really bonded was over him teaching me to make plátanos for breakfast. Since then he has become one of my closest friends and mentor. (Female from Kansas City, Missouri, Spring 2013)

Homemade chili. My grandmother has always made it for the family when we visit and especially holidays (Thanksgiving and Christmas). My mother learned the recipe and now makes it at home for family dinners. It always makes me feel at home and safe; now that my grandma passed away, it’s a remembrance of her :). (Female from Iowa, Spring 2012)

My madeleine is chocolate biscotti. It brings me images of my childhood and all of my family’s shared experiences. It reminds me of my heritage, as my grandparents and great-grandparents emigrated here from Italy and grew up in Italian neighborhoods in St. Louis. This is a dish we eat during holidays, so images of Christmas trees come to mind as well. (Male from St. Louis, Spring 2012)

Cinnamon apples. Growing up (and now, when I visit), I used to always help my Grandma Ruby make cinnamon apples. She would always sneak me some of the Red Hot candies we used to flavor the apples, too! I look forward to it every time we visit Grandma and Grandpa’s house. It brings to mind the generation of the Great Depression. We have them at every family meal, so in a way it makes you part of the family group. (Female from Illinois, Spring 2012)

My single most powerful madeleine is shrimp. Not only does it evoke my cultural ties but it brings me back to warm days on Bermuda Bluff with my parents, the taste of salt water as I hold the knot in my teeth, the smell of the spices as the pot boils and the feeling of the shells as I spend hours beside my family plucking off shrimp heads and tails. It is a positive homemade comfort food, and I don’t get this feeling from shrimp of fast food quality. It binds me to the Low country families, which shrimped and crabbed to supplement their diets. (Male from Beaufort, South Carolina, Spring 2012)

This sampling of my students’ testimonials supports the idea that madeleines are associated with ethnic or regional identity, nostalgia, and parental nurturing and, not surprisingly, almost all of them identify their madeleines as comfort food. Also noteworthy, for my students, madeleines are connected with memory, usually positive memories.¹⁴

Upon entering the body, food inspires memory by linking sensory and cognitive processes through synesthesia—the sensory properties of taste, smell, sound, and appearance.¹⁵ The idea that memory is embedded in food’s organoleptic and synesthetic properties is supported in social science research as well as in the humanities. Because memory is embodied, it is worth considering how taste works vis-à-vis memory and the brain.¹⁶ Here I summarize some recent research relevant to the topic of comfort food derived from disciplines outside of the humanities. Cognitive psychologists use computer metaphors to understand the brain’s unconscious processes,¹⁷ as both humans and computers constitute thinking engines, although the metaphor has limitations. For one, it is not possible to separate the rational from the emotional elements. Also, brains are like snowflakes in that each is unique. There is tremendous variability of connections in the brains of different individuals because of unique developmental histories and experiences. Even children of the same biological family—being genetically similar and exposed to the same foods—have individualized preferences, tastes, and memories about the same events. In the brain, “synaptic connections change, die, are created every day, and vary in each individual, affecting the way things and events are remembered.”¹⁸ In order to taste, “the brain forms its ov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• “Stressed” Spelled Backwards Is “Desserts”: Self-Medicating Moods with Foods
• From Whim Whams to Spotted Dick: “Pudding, [England’s] Universal Dish”
• Even Presidents Need Comfort Food: Tradition, Food, and Politics at the Valois Cafeteria
• Going for Doughboys in Little Rhody: Class, Place, and Nostalgia
• Hungry for My Past: Kitchen Comfort with Fried Bread and Eggs
• Viili as a Finnish American Comfort Food: The Long and Short of It
• Comfort Food in Culinary Tourism: Negotiating “Home” as Exotic and Familiar
• “Newfie Steak”: Boloney as Tradition and Play in Newfoundland
• “I Know You Got Soul”: Traditionalizing a Contested Cuisine
• Comfort (and Discomfort) Food: Social Surrogacy and Embodied Memory in Real and Reel Life
• Haunted Tongues and Hollow Comforts: Examples of Culinary Conscience in Indonesian Fiction
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index