Nostalgic Food
The term comfort food can cover a lot of bases. It can be what one seeks out when depressed, ill, or fatigued. For me it can also encompass nostalgia–this food from that favorite restaurant, or this food because I used to eat it with that person.
Last month, I visited the east coast. A friend picked me up at the train station, and I said I needed something to eat. She mentioned a restaurant I’d never much liked, but that was close. To my surprise and delight, she had mixed up what was where, and we walked instead into a new location of a bakery that I loved when I lived there. I did not see either of the two favorite treats I used to get, but I asked with tentative hope for a berry roll or a grape focaccia. Imagine my further delight: they had both. They heated the focaccia and toasted the berry roll, then gave me goat cheese to spread on it. My friend shared the details of her new academic fellowship while I munched on two favorite foods that I’d often eaten in her company years ago. It was a lovely reunion, however brief, with my friend. It was all the more lovely for the serendipitous addition of favored food.
July 23rd, 2005 at 5:24 pm
Wierd to read this now, as I’ve just stepped away from watching James Martin make foccaccia and was musing on my need to learn how to make the grape foccaccia of blessed memory. Am v jealous indeed of your trip with the lovely academic in question.
August 3rd, 2005 at 4:32 pm
this is the lovely academic in question, writing from sweaty philadelphia to say that there’s plenty of focaccia, berry bread and goat cheese to be had if you were just to move back here and eat it with me. and when i say “you,” i mean both of you.
the lovely academic would also like you to know that she spent the morning riding a friend’s horse and then taking a dip in the pool by the barn before driving home in her wet suit. please don’t tell the aforementioned funders because i think she’s supposed to be chained to her computer and not having even close to that much fun.