What does comfort food mean to you? We tend to equate the term with something hearty and maybe even indulgent, but comfort can come in all shapes and sizes. One person’s lasagna Bolognese is another person’s mushroom taco, and one person’s polenta with chickpeas is another person’s Spam musubi.
What brings you comfort depends on why you need comforting in the first place.
When I lost my mother two years ago, I was soothed by the flavors of my youth, such as the “Texas salad” she made (and I later reinvented) and the broccoli cream cheese casserole I have yet to write about (but will sooner or later). Since one of my closest friends, Karin, died of cancer this summer, I’ve been ruminating on all the foods we’d eaten together over four decades of friendship, a menu heavy on chips and salsa, margaritas — and all manner of vegetables.
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Get the recipe: Cacio e Pepe Soup With Chickpeas and Kale
End of carouselWe shared a gusto for eating, even once her need for a weapon (and a sense of control) against a devastating disease caused her to make much more careful dietary choices than I ever have. She was vegetarian long before I was, showing me that you could seek and find satisfaction in seemingly endless combinations of produce, beans and grains flavored from time to time with sometimes injudicious amounts of butter and cheese. I’ve eaten less and less of the latter over the years, but this week, after I returned from her memorial service feeling stirred up emotionally again, they were part of my cravings.
Share this articleShareCoincidentally, I had been cooking out of a book whose title speaks so clearly to me right now: “Comfort & Joy” by London-based restaurateur and writer Ravinder Bhogal. It’s one of those books in which I immediately marked more than a dozen recipes to try, and the first on my list amazed me with its brilliance.
It seemed like such a modest proposition: A chickpea, orzo and kale soup flavored by a combination of ingredients made famous by a classic pasta dish. And it came together like so many soups before it — at least at first. I fried onions gently, stirred in garlic and lemon zest, then brought broth to a boil and simmered kale, chickpeas and orzo in it until the latter swelled. Nice enough, if a little spartan. Then in went a pile of fluffy grated pecorino Romano and cubes of butter, and as I stirred, the broth transformed from cloudy to rich, matte to glossy, a little bit thin to a little bit thick. It was magic. And with a few turns of the pepper grinder, I could see it and smell it: cacio e pepe.
I took a sip straight from the pot, then ladled myself out a bowlful, topped it with more cacio and more pepe, and sat down to finish it in silence for lunch. The teenager was at school, the husband upstairs with the flu. I thought about Karin, whom I met when I was 18 and she 20, looked at pictures from our recent trip to a spa in Mexico, and read through all the text messages we exchanged since her cancer returned with a vengeance a year ago. I thought about how, when you get to know someone so well at the same time that you’re also just getting to know yourself, your identities can seem almost inextricable, much like the cheese and butter melting into each other in my bowl.
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Would Karin have loved this soup as much as I did? No doubt. I so wished I could share the recipe with her. And I so wished the bowl could last forever, but nothing — and nobody — does.
I plan to try much more out of Bhogal’s book, but first I know I’ll cook this soup at least a few more times as I grieve, until I need a little less comfort and can embrace a little more joy. Soon.
Get the recipe: Cacio e Pepe Soup With Chickpeas and Kale
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