It strikes me, not for the first time, that the simple things in life can be the most complicated. If something is flagged as complicated or paradoxical, then we’re geared up for nuance. It’s the apparently straightforward things that are anything but.
Take the very word “simple,” or a word like “normal.” While they seem like statements of the obvious, they mean different things to different people. I tell my youngest son not to rest his feet on the table when we’re all eating, for instance. My explanation is clear. It’s just not “normal,” I say. In his mind, though, it’s the most “normal” position he could take. It’s comfortable, he’s at home, it’s informal. Why wouldn’t he kick back and put his feet up on the table?
We’ll get there, no doubt, but it makes me think about how the most everyday feelings can be so richly complex. My “normal” is not always my sons’. My “simple” might be only mine. Someone else’s idea of “fun” or “boring” or “exciting” is often unrecognizable to others.
Recipe: Butternut, Tamarind and Coconut Stew
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the word “comfort.” It’s the title of my new cookbook, so discussions have been many and varied in recent weeks. What does comfort mean in the context of food, and what does it mean to me? If I add ginger, curry leaves and tamarind to my shakshuka, for example, and serve it with steamed rice, as brilliantly suggested by my co-author, Helen Goh, is it still a shakshuka? Is it still my comfort food? Does it still have the necessary familiarity?
My definition of comfort changes from one moment to the next. Sometimes, it’s a feeling or memory, other times a specific dish. I might say it’s the food that reminds me of home, but then how does the food I eat from far-off places, like Helen’s Malaysian-inspired shakshuka, fit into comfort? Is it to do with eating with my hands, perhaps, which I also take great comfort in, or on a street corner with lots of passers-by around me?
It also varies with the season (cold noodles and ice cream are what I crave on a hot day), what’s at my local shop or in my fridge, who is coming around. It changes depending on the context of the meal and why and what I’m eating. I can get as much comfort from a solitary late-night fridge raid — a snatched chunk of cheese, a spoonful of pickle — as I can from a meal with friends that takes up a whole weekend afternoon.
The most everyday feelings can be richly complex.
Even when we know a dish is “comforting,” people cooking and eating it will experience it differently. This butternut squash stew, a dish I often make at home, is one example. At the start of fall, it feels like the orange-colored season on a plate. The thing I find most comforting, though, as the person cooking, is the calming process of getting everything ready: of finely dicing the onions and getting my spices lined up, of taking the time to really sweat down the onions, low and slow, filling the house with the smell that makes it a home. Once everything is simmering away on the stovetop, there is an hour until dinner. At the end of another jittery, uncertain day, I will have made something that I can point to. It’s there! That’s my take on comfort, today.
Two friends come around; a small group of kids appears at the table. Someone smells the coconut and tamarind, the curry leaves and spices, and feels connected to a childhood home. One person reaches for the flatbread or rice — comfort begins with carbs, for many — while someone else just takes a moment to take in the comfort of us all being around a table together: community.
One bowl, one feeling — comfort — but with so many iterations: community and connection, memory and nostalgia, chopping and coconut, curry and carbs. Ever the seeker of his kind of comfort, my son pushes back his chair, ready to tilt back and get into his favorite position. I probably won’t say a thing this time. To the contrary, it seems, it might have to be (temporarily) added to the list of comforts.
Recipe: Butternut, Tamarind and Coconut Stew
The post The Perfect Stew for Fall Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect appeared first on New York Times.
