Saveur: The New Comfort Food

Last night I cooked the perfect meal. There was nothing new or unusual about it, just split pea soup and frisée salad, recipes I’ve known for years. But the crisp, bitter greens were studded with smoky bacon, and the yolk of a just-poached egg ran luxuriously over the top. The soup, made with leftovers from a ham I’d baked the day before, was warming and rich. Together with a hunk of crusty bread, these dishes made me incomparably happy.

Foods like these—comfort foods—we don’t just eat, we hunger for. They are the chicken soup that’s been simmering on the stove all afternoon, filling the house with tantalizing aromas. Or the macaroni and cheese, the version with béchamel and Gruyère, that your family and friends beg you to make. You eat them on the fly, standing up at market stalls: shakshuka, eggs poached in a spicy tomato stew, scooped from a curbside pot in Jerusalem; or crisp-fried spring rolls stuffed with pork and rice noodles, gobbled in a busy Bangkok market. They are restaurant classics: the crunchy fried chicken that a neighborhood joint is famous for, or the linguine tossed in white-wine sauce with mussels and shrimp at that Italian-American place we keep going back to. No matter where they’re eaten, comfort foods are the ones we’ve known and loved forever; the ones we ate as kids and the ones we yearn for as adults. They’re the foods that taste like home, wherever you happen to be when you eat them.

These are the dishes that we’ve always celebrated in the pages of saveur magazine: soulful, honest, traditional fare that transcends trend and defines the way people eat all over the globe. Every cuisine has its canon of comfort, the foods that folks crave above all others and the ones they eat day in and day out. Those are the recipes you’ll find in this book: for good, old American stick-to-your-ribs fare, like Texas chili, Rhode Island stuffed clams, chicken pot pie, and patty melts; and for international dishes like guacamole and French onion soup, whose comfort the world has claimed as its own. There are the great pastas of Italy, like fettuccine Alfredo—that irresistible tangle of pasta, butter, and cheese—and homemade tagliatelle egg noodles with slow-simmered, meaty ragù bolognese. There are the lusty one-pot meals, like boeuf à la bourguignonne, and oven-baked triumphs like potatoes gratin—dishes that French cooks affectionately call cuisine grand-mère, or grandma’s cuisine. All told, this compendium represents some of the best traditional home cooking on the planet.

There’s also something new about this collection of comfort foods. It reflects just how much the category has grown. If you’re like me—I came of age in postwar California, raised by parents
who loved to cook—you might have grown up on a far-reaching diet of foods like tamales, bagels and lox, Chinese spareribs, and, yes, meat loaf. But today, our comfort-food vocabulary is even broader. We have access to it all: fresh lemongrass, Israeli couscous, handmade corn tortillas, dried baccalà. We travel more. America’s population continues to become more diverse. And we’ve learned volumes about the way the world eats.