Dear friends, I had good intentions, really I did. Then I looked up from my pile of notecards and key texts (just how much source material on large-scale food production in Mesopotamia can one read? answer: get back to work, you!) and discovered it was 7 p.m. on a Sunday night. Sigh. Since I'm still in a writerly frame of mind, though, this post, which I originally wrote on April 25, 2004, is particularly resonant tonight. Stay tuned, dear friends.
A caveat, one without which I am too cowardly to share the thoughts below: The opinions expressed below are mine and only mine, and they are opinions and only opinions. They may be completely wrongheaded, and what I find intensely praiseworthy may be only as so much shite to you. You are even free to tell me so, although, of course, I will like you better if you don't. 
There are two kinds of writing that I love. One aims to soothe, the other aims to challenge and enlighten. I am a big fan of stretching one's boundaries, challenging one's assumptions, shining a light on misconceptions and false assumptions. But that is a discussion for another night. Tonight I am considering the nature of comfort.
I have eaten a lot of cooking and read a lot of writing that is meant to engender a very specific food memory, mostly of the comfort-food variety. True comfort food is supposed to evoke Mom, or Grandma, or a gaggle of aunties, or a Mom-Grandma-Auntie-like neighbor lady. It is supposed to be about nurturing, sharing, love made tangible, communion with ourselves and each other and nature and generations of ancestors. I have no quarrel with such ideals as long as they are organic, by which I mean that they flow naturally out of your own experience. But if you try to create a Momma's Kitchen O'Love idiom when you hated your grandmother or your mom believed that real women make reservations, then the people reading your words just might suspect that they are being sold a bill of goods. They will feel manipulated. They will become vaguely resentful.
This is a problem I have with a particular culinary memoir, one that I won't name here (although if you're an astute foodie, you may be able to guess what it is). When this book came out, I was thrilled. It had everything to recommend itself to me: It was a collection of thoughtful essays about food, which I love to read. Each essay boasted plenty of research, incorporating science, history, funny stories and puckish observations. It was a celebration of home-and-hearth cooking, a glorious field that has not been given proper historical consideration (although, thankfully, that is changing thanks to the work of disciplined culinary historians). It was published in hardcover by my favorite publishing house, a small press that, among other worthy tasks, is rereleasing the long out-of-print works of my adored Dawn Powell. It is filled with terrific recipes. It is written by a bright, funny, kindhearted woman who is obviously a demon cook. If I were invited to her house for dinner, I'd consider myself lucky.
And yet, and yet. It is hard for me to overstate how cold I was left by this book. I was not won over by the tale of her father's first taste of stew and polenta at his mother-in-law's table. I was not enchanted by her breadbaking aunt. I should have been enamored of her grandmother's blackberry pie recipe, but instead I was irritated by her repeated shots at restaurant food and the cooks who were unable to tell pate brisee from good old American pie dough. I was irritated even more by her unspoken but urgent insistence that I love all these women, women who were certainly kind and gentle and skilled cooks, but who I barely knew, certainly didn't know well enough to love, and felt disinclined to love by virtue of that bludgeoning: See how lovable they are, so much more so than those awful, awful restaurant chefs? By the time I got to the essay on food as aphrodisiac, I wanted to throw the book across the room. At the same time, though, I felt guilty. Wasn't she writing exactly what I wanted to read? Wasn't she writing exactly what I wanted to write? Aha...a question of sour grapes? Maybe I should try reading it again? Surely the problem was with me, not with her? The reader reviews on Amazon were unanimous in their praise. Writers I respected showered accolades on the book. It had to be me.
Friends, I read this book four times. In the end, I decided that the problem is probably with me, but I just can't will myself into feeling something that just isn't there. I am sure that the writing works a special kind of magic, but I am just impervious to it. That's fine. None of us is universal, no matter how we wish we were. And I have to admit that I am curious about the earlier drafts of the book, seen only to the author and her editor. The author is a graduate of a writing program, and it shows in her writing: technically, it is flawless, but there is, to me, anyway, an overwritten, overrevised, overpolished quality to it. I wonder if there is an earlier, rougher, more compelling draft, burnished into smoothness. The author also claims that she used a large number of sources to research her essays, but her bibliography doesn't reflect this; instead, she gives a "recommended reading" list. Did she try to include all of her sources, and was she discouraged from doing so? (I do have to take issue with a flight of fancy she has about Fannie Farmer "stamping her dainty foot" as she insisted on volume measurements in recipes. Anyone who has ever seen a picture of Fannie Farmer, or read even a brief biographical sketch of her, would know better than that.) Once upon a time, was there a book inside this book that I just might have loved?
Enough with kicking this poor book to the curb already. So, Jen, just what do you want, anyway? Despite my seemingly harsh words earlier about comfort food writing, I do have a particular fondness for writing that evokes a certain kind of comfort, the kind that is found in a temporarily well-ordered universe. I call it "Friday night mind," that feeling you get when your immediate burdens are lifted, when you are freshly delivered from work and obligation, when you can deviate from your regular dinner routine (i.e. cooking if you live on takeout during the week, ordering takeout if you cook during the week), where you can stay up late if you want to. It is a sense of presence, a moment of contentment and satisfaction with the present moment.
It is the feeling I get every time I read Laurie Colwin's essay "Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant," from Home Cooking. In this piece, Miss Colwin reminisces about a 7'x 20' apartment in Greenwich Village where she lived for eight years, cooking on a two-burner stove, doing dishes in her bathtub, cultivating her coffee palate. Although all of her anecdotes are rich and funny, I particularly liked the story of her moving in, aided by two friends named Alice, on a cool summer day. As a housewarming present, a friend had given her a fondue pot, and she decided it would be nice to serve steak fondue to the Alices. She bought a fancy piece of sirloin from the butcher, made two dipping sauces and bought a third, bearnaise, from a delicatessen. The fondue was not a success, the oil going from not hot enough to so hot that boiling oil overflowed from the sides of the pot. Miss Colwin saved the day by sauteeing the steak cubes in a frying pan and pouring all of the sauces over them. She and the Alices devour the steaks, then head out to a bar for burgers and fries.
It is also the feeling I got the first time I read "Doing the Subcontinental." This simple essay was like a little movie for me, the image of a cold weatherworn night, the heroine with a mind full of worry and a heart full of trouble, visiting a friend stirring something interesting in a pot, taking it home and replicating it in her own kitchen. I also love the party at which the keema macaroni is served. I think of a large group of happy people, broken off into smaller groups of happy people, the table with the keema macaroni sitting on it, "calling no attention to itself." It is hard to elaborate, or to encapsulate, just what it is that resonates with me so, but resonate it does.
It was this essay that inspired me to track down a copy of Curries Without Worries, which brings out that familiar rush of comfort and pleasure. I have a lot of Indian cookery books, all of which are splendid books full of luscious and fragrant recipes, but Curries is easily the friendliest, chattiest, calmest, warmest of the bunch. Sudha Koul is both a great believer in basic Indian home cooking and an enthusiastic teacher of it. Consider the following passage, from the introduction to the 1983 edition (I have the 1994 edition, published by Cashmir, Inc., Pennington, NJ):
I still remember the day when some very dear friends of my husband invited us for dinner and served an Indian meal. They had, on occasion, enjoyed Indian meals cooked by my husband and wanted to give his still quite new bride a surprise. And they did! I had come to the U.S. for the first time and was intrigued by the prospect of eating an Indian meal cooked by Americans. To my surprise they served a delectable looking vegetable curry and hot, fluffy rice...a simple and authentic Indian meal. I eagerly took a mouthful and bit into something hard and pungent, almost bitter. The quintessential Indian spice turmeric...in its natural state! Swallowing it rapidly, I thought to myself that the recipe must not have explained that ground turmeric was required. I cannot think of any spice used in Western cooking that would even approximate such a culinary disaster had it been added whole instead of ground.
Even a cookbook must be inspired, and this episode sowed the seeds of a desire to introduce my new friends to Indian cooking. I hope my relating this episode at the very beginning of the book will not make an apprehensive reader even more apprehensive. I must add that, after removing the remaining pieces of turmeric, I enjoyed a hearty and delicious meal. The food was not rich, heavy, overly spicy or gourmet, rather, it consisted of wholesome, honest-to-goodness, everyday Indian preparations, thoroughly enjoyable and healthy, despite the aforementioned oversight. I was made to feel at home by the thoughtfulness that had gone into its preparation and by its superb quality.
The second edition, published in 1989, includes this amendment to the introduction:
Remember, this is not a book for fanatics. It is an authentic Indian cookbook used by genuine cooks of Indian cuisine. Adjustments have been made to a new time and place. No cuisine stipulates only one way of making a dish. Betty's apple pie tastes different from Pam's, both are real and delicious. You may not be able to replicate that dal you had at a friend's house, but there are as many ways to cook dal as there are friends!
If I had a friend like this at my elbow, I would never know a moment's fear in the kitchen. This passage, this book, it is more than comforting, it is fortifying. It makes an argument for kindness as one of the most powerful weapons we have against the things that would sap us. Spite, indifference, needless cruelty, sloppy work, sloppy weather, heartbreak: we cannot make them stand still, yet we can make them run, as Andrew Marvell said. Take a pot of keema, a tray of gingerbread, a bowl of lentils, a tub of bearnaise sauce from the delicatessen. When they help you find a place in time that you would not trade for anything, that's when you know you have found something special.