There Will Always Be a Fondness for Comfort Foods Just Like Mom Made : Chicken Soup, Ice Cream, Mashed Potatoes Are Among Dishes Recalled as Culinary Remedies That Make You Feel Better When You’re Sick

“What do you like to eat when you’re sick?”

The woman in my life had just found me sick for the first time and had asked what was to her the most helpful question.

No one had asked me that for decades. But the answer followed automatically:

“Tapioca pudding. And beef bouillon on Holland Rusks, if you can find them.”

She called this comfort food, and that’s as good a name as any I’ve been able to apply. It’s the food no doctor ever prescribes for you--at least officially--(and that’s why you won’t find room-temperature 7-Up in this article) and no hospital ever thinks to include a convalescent’s diet.

But everyone knows about it. When you have the blahs or the genuine shivers and shakes, when your world has shrunk to the boundaries of your fingers and toes, when the weather outside is frightful and nothing else will cheer you up, comfort food makes you feel pampered and cared for.

Associated With Home Cooking

Comfort food is probably the food your mother prepared for you when you were a sick tyke. One person even called it mother food. It seems still, even in the days of food so fast it’s instant, to be associated with home cooking.

Comfort food remains comforting. I asked a random selection of about 125 people of all ages to describe their favorites and stood back, overwhelmed by lengthy, enthusiastic responses.

It may be technically possible to separate comfort food from simple childhood favorites such as the Fudgesicle I always had before nap time or the old-fashioned cooking that Mom did when the children came home for the holidays, but the lines do blur. What is remarkable is the universality of comfort foods.

Consider that evocative, soggy heap of white-bread toast, melted butter, salt and pepper and warmed milk called milk toast. Although it acquired various monikers (sops, according to one English-born respondent and graveyard stew, per an elderly aficionado of short-order lingo) it made the list of practically everyone older than 50. Not that all thought kindly of it--it was bland and associated with sickness--but how they remembered it.

And consider special teas. One Latino mentioned with great zest the te de yerba buena her mother always provided when she was ill. The good herb of the title is mint, and mint tea showed up on many non-Latino lists. One longtime Californian remembered cambric tea, which was simply very weak tea laced with milk and sugar. Hot tea with various alcoholic infusions was popular--peach and cherry brandies sounded yummy. Chamomile tea, sassafras tea--all gentle, all well-remembered.

Apparently nothing is more universally comforting than chicken, unless it’s soup. Thus chicken soups appeared on many lists. So much for the invalidity of stereotype. Though homemade soups led the way, Campbell’s Chicken Noodle was clearly etched into memory, and equally so for those older and younger than 30.

Stewed or Boiled

If the chicken didn’t get made into comforting soups, it tended to be stewed or otherwise boiled, combined in that brothy rich state with soft white things--rice, noodles (homemade, especially if the respondents were Middle-European) or potatoes. A native Chinese especially praised congee rice gruel with chicken and mustard greens.

The most frequently mentioned combination of hot foods was chicken and mashed potatoes. But mashed potatoes outranked all other vegetables. If you don’t think a potato is a vegetable, tune out. Potatoes swept the boards. One 20-year-old virtually shouted, “mashed, baked, fried, French, au gratin or raw.” An older woman mused that no matter how many wondrous things she cooked for her husband, it was the home-fried potatoes when he was sick that he’d talk about. Second only to chicken soup among the soups was potato soup, none more tasty sounding than kartoffel und bonne soupe met knockwurst.

Gravy goes well with potatoes, and gravy of various types rated high, even by itself. Oft-mentioned sandwiches came with gravy. All the sandwiches at the top of the list tended to be those you could sink teeth and thumbs into, such as grilled cheese or peanut butter and jelly. Then there was the pensive soul who said, “When I’m feeling depressed I like to eat a club sandwich; I don’t know why, and now that I think about it, it’s kind of weird.”

People of all ages mentioned cinnamon toast; not only that, they knew that real cinnamon toast wasn’t commercially prepared and that it wasn’t made in a toaster. Older respondents recalled the simple, satisfying sandwich made from bread, butter and sugar.

All this tends to suggest that comfort foods are soft rather than tough, bland-seeming rather than spicy, often gauged to appeal to the pastel side of the palate. There was a minority report: “anything from the deli,” “when I’m sick the last thing I want is something bland; give me tacos.” But in general the rule followed for special gems such as squashed bananas--mashing a favorite jam or jelly into bananas with a fork--or saltines crumbled up with sugar in milk.

In a class by itself is menudo, far and away the favored ethnic comfort food, in this survey.

Although ice cream is nearly universal, it shows up on the lists of more people younger than 50, with notable exceptions: one Kansan recalled whipped cream and canned cherries frozen in the snow. In general, older people were most likely to list tapiocas and various custards for comfort desserts, accompanied by milk melanges such as hot honey-milk. One middle-aged mother vows that such things remain youthful favorites if mom prepares them, and a teen-ager who listed my mom’s special banana vanilla wafer pudding lends her support.

Classify Geographically

It is tempting to classify Americans geographically by comfort food. Mentioning a choice of dill pickle and jelly doughnut to another person caused the immediate label of a person from Oklahoma. Texans may recognize the respondent who lauded hot buttermilk corn bread, pinto or pink beans cooked a long time with some bacon or ham, and whole cold peach pickles with a whole clove stuck in. The delicacy of dipping a peppermint stick into lemon juice was sworn by one teen-ager to belong forever to her hometown of Buffalo, N.Y.

Comfort foods probably should not include various specific home remedies, though it is irresistible to set some of them down: Cincinnati, a 50-to-50 blend of beer and tomato juice, sliced tomatoes with salt, pepper and vinegar, good for settling the stomach; cider vinegar to sip all day long if you’re on a hike; prunella, a powerful, soothing concoction said to be 80% alcohol; and for those able and willing to remember, Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, a ministration of myriad utility.

It is even the statements that seem eccentric that tend to point up the underlying similarities among comfort foods. The chocolate-covered fortune cookies from a posh Balboa shop are, after all, the same as the heartfelt citations of chocolate cake--and of chocolate and cocoa in general.

One young athletic male expanded and defined the concept of comfort food in a useful and contemporary way:

Mom always had food in the fridge, be it salami, salad, ice cream, bacon, steak, hot dogs, or, in the cookie box, fig newtons, chocolate chip cookies, etc. Comfort food is dependent on what is available.

Thus comfort food seems truly comforting when it’s put out for you, or made fresh for you, or, bought and brought back to you by someone who loves you. And that’s not limited to mom.

This meaning seems truest of all perhaps in violation of medicine, but right in tune with emotional reality.

And don’t forget tapioca pudding and beef bouillion with Holland Rusks. When I mentioned that combination to the woman in my life, she smiled knowingly, searched it out (though, being Scandinavian she could have substituted Scorpar for Holland Rusks and I would never have known,) cooked it and presented it to me. I felt better almost immediately. And we got married and settled down to live comfortingly ever after.