Advertisement
Menu Twenty-Four
North African Comfort Food
Appears in
By David Tanis
Published 2008
What a strange idea: “comfort food.” Isn’t every food comforting in its own way? Why are certain foods disqualified? Can’t fancy food be soothing in the same way as granny food? Must it always be about loaded memories, like Proust’s madeleine? Or can it be merely quirky, like M. F. K. Fisher’s tangerine ritual: she dried them on a radiator, then cooled them on her Paris windowsill.
Comfort food—food that reassures—is different things to different people. For some, the phrase conjures meat loaf and mashed potatoes, or stuffed cabbage rolls, or just a good roast chicken. For a friend who’s traveled quite a lot in Southeast Asia, Chinese rice porridge, the salty kind, replaced his mother’s oatmeal as a kind of touchstone. For me, comfort is Champagne and oysters, and it’s a chicken stew, perhaps dating back to a childhood hot lunch dish, made by a doting aunt who called it “chicken in sauce.” I called it “goopy chicken,” and I loved it.