“This dish reminds me of when I was little …”, “This makes me think of when I lived in the old house …”. How many times has it happened to you to say a similar phrase after having eaten a certain dish or having smelled a particular perfume coming from the kitchen? Here, this phenomenon takes the name of comfort food , an English expression that refers to the consoling effects of food.
Comfort food indicates precisely those foods that are able to give rise to strong emotions in those who consume them, arousing a great sense of pleasure and satisfaction. In most cases, these are foods that recall periods and episodes related to childhood or adolescence and, precisely for this reason, they are often healthy, genuine, homemade and traditional foods such as grandma’s cookies, mother’s cake, the hot bread Grandpa bought, aunt’s fried bread, and so on. Obviously there is no comfort food list, everyone has their own and no food is excluded.
Eating a “comfort” food means nourishing oneself with emotions, memories, feelings that can fill inner voids, feelings of loneliness and nostalgia for a few moments.
Eating is not a simple daily action that only serves our body to survive but it is a way to pamper our soul. In fact, food can in some cases become a memory, offer us a journey into the past, make us relive distant moments, situations with people who are no longer there. It is the search for a lost moment, in which we want to take refuge to get better.
Often people are looking for comfort foods because they are stressed or live far from home or feel alone and lost.
Comfort food can be considered the highest stage that food can reach, it is the perfect combination of food and emotions. To use the terms of Ilaria Mazzarotta, who writes a book on the subject, comfort food is “that comfortable sofa that you can’t throw away, on which you can spend time alone, snuggle up with those you love, sitting chatting with friends for share a pleasant moment “.
