I have long considered myself an authority on comfort food. No panic is too minor, no hardship too trivial to warrant a plate of something delicious and reassuring. I love takeaway pizzas (the greasier the better), and have eaten more than my fair share of ‘family size’ packets of cheese and onion crisps. I love sausage sandwiches and corned beef sandwiches and fish finger sandwiches; I love any kind of toastie – or just endless rounds of toast, smothered in Marmite. Don’t even get me started on supermarket rotisserie chickens.
Comfort food, in my view, is about instant gratification and minimum effort. But sometimes, if I’m feeling stressed or wound up, a takeaway or a sandwich doesn’t quite scratch the itch. at’s where comfort cooking comes in. I discovered it by accident, at the moment when I needed it most. It was early 2013, and I was already deeply unhappy in my job as a criminal barrister, traipsing from courtroom to courtroom for judges and clients to shout at me, when my mother died suddenly, leaving me utterly adrift.
It’s probably trite to say that my mum was my best friend, but she really was: we were ridiculously close, talking multiple times a day on the phone. Nobody knew me as well as she did – no one loved me as fiercely. When she died, I was heartbroken but, without our conversations, I was also swimming in spare time. I didn’t know how to deal with the tidal wave of grief. I wanted to do something – anything – to ll the long, lonely hours, so I began cooking. It wasn’t really a conscious decision: I just wanted to keep busy. I didn’t expect it to be comforting really – I was just looking for distraction. First a cheese sauce, then a lemon curd – I chose things that required concentration, but little aptitude. Things you have to keep stirring, basically.
These efforts produced an unexpected succour. I began to branch out, going through the motions of slowly caramelising onions (a truly slow act – those recipes that tell you it takes five minutes lie), or stirring a risotto. I folded dumplings and rolled meatballs, feeling myself calm down with each roll or knead. Comfort cooking is different to the daily grind of trying to conjure a dish when you can’t be bothered. It’s time out from that pace of life; it’s a release. I’ve never been good at mindfulness – my head can’t cope with being entirely unoccupied – but I’ve come to believe that comfort cooking is meditation for those who can’t meditate. When you’re done, tomorrow will seem a little more manageable than it did before.
Comfort cooking isn’t impressive, and it isn’t pretty. This isn’t about beef Wellington or macarons or hollandaise. You should always want to eat the end result, but you’ll seldom feel any desire to Instagram it. It’s all about you: what you want to cook, what you want to eat, how you want to feel. It sounds trite – and it probably is – but I think cooking for myself at this most painful time was a profound act of self-care.
Cooking gave a purpose and rhythm to my days: where I would otherwise have been speaking to my mum, or maybe reading a book or watching telly (both activities that had lost their appeal: I just couldn’t concentrate on them), I would find myself in the kitchen. It began as my lifebelt on a sea of grief: something to cling on to – sometimes literally, white knuckles gripping a wooden spoon as I fought to find equilibrium when everything had been knocked off balance. But later, it became less of a lifebelt and more a lifeboat. Cooking gave me control: I was in charge now.
Over time, my little forays added up to something bigger. As I spent days kneading bread doughs and tending to bubbling sauces, a quiet hum of happiness emerged. I was still grieving, but I wasn’t just grieving. There was light at the end of the tunnel. The physical satisfaction of cooking for myself pulled me up out of the pain that had overwhelmed my life. It gave me the time and space to come to terms with my new reality, to gradually process my own sadness and loneliness.
And the job that made me miserable? I gave it up. For cooking, actually – I’m now a private chef and food writer: I cater for weddings and bake towering cakes, and I write about cookery and – sometimes – its relationship with grief and love. I have a life that looks quite different to the one before, and with significantly more happiness and comfort in it. There are lots of things I make now that Mum, I’m pretty sure, would think were a bit mad: sourdough that takes days from start to finish; ridiculous, fiddly (whisper it: pointless) flowers crafted from sugar. But the idea of comfort cooking, I think she would get.
She didn’t really enjoy cooking, although she was good at it. But what she made for me, my sister and my dad was always laced with care: her vegetables chopped neatly, as she tended a casserole dish bubbling on the stove. Cooking was her way of giving comfort to us. Maybe it was inevitable that in my grief, I would clutch at what had brought me comfort in the past. Now, I cook for all kinds of reasons – but the most important one is the one I started out with. It’s me alone in my kitchen, stirring a sauce until everything starts to look a little smoother.