Comfort Food

Lin Yutang, the Chinese writer and inventor, once wrote "What is patriotism but the love of the good things we ate in our childhood?" While, as a veteran, I don't know that I agree with him about patriotism, I do think that many people have memories of foods that we fondly recall when we are troubled or long for simpler times when the world seemed friendlier and more ordered. People from many different ethnic backgrounds have particular foods that are often associated with holiday traditions or family gatherings. Nothing can evoke the past like the aromas of such foods wafting from a kitchen.

For my wife, what she recalls most vividly is her Hungarian grandmother's chicken soup. While her grandmother would often skimp on ingredients for other Hungarian dishes, her soup was marvelous. To begin with, she made all her noodles from scratch - all kinds of noodles in all kinds of shapes and all different sizes. Then there were the vegetables. But what stayed in my wife's memory were the carrots - scrubbed, not peeled and in big chunks. But the crowning achievement was the taste of the broth itself. My wife was only able to duplicate it once and is not even sure how she did it. (She thinks it might have something to do with the use of the whole chicken - including the feet. I don't know if that could be true, but these days, the only raw chickens that have their feet attached are made of rubber.) Anyway, coming from a family of six children, her memories of family meals at her grandmother's house were of the big bowls of soup they all filled up on before the main meal was served. I find it interesting that whatever else was served at those meals did not seem all that memorable to her.

As we face this new year, with its new challenges and new stresses, maybe it would do us all good to think of a comfort food that we have not enjoyed in a long time and prepare it by our own hands, in our own kitchens, from family recipes handed down through the generations. As we share these simple joys with our own children, perhaps we can build fond memories for their futures.