The Comfort Zone : Trying to ease the pain of life? Try mashed potatoes

There is undeniable evidence that the public is turning from the elitisms and eclecticisms of recent innovative cuisines and heading toward the familiar, the simple, the plentiful, the comforting .

Restaurant menus, like the one by chef Peter Roelant at the Four Oaks Inn, are studded with words like warm, bed, home-smoked, homemade, farm-raised, sweet, candied, plump. At the drop-dead hip DC 3 the menu bears a reproduction of an Ed Ruscha word painting: HARMLESS DINNERS. Food, in other words, is your friend.

The term comfort food , it would seem, is the generic catch-all for several sub-food-fads. There’s the monstrous, near universal retro-appetite for mashed potatoes, ice cream and fried things with gravy that spawned a new breed of diners and shows no sign of diminishing. In more sophisticated circles, there’s mythic simplicity and nourishment, which has generated International Peasant Fare. Meanwhile, scientists are finally, officially acknowledging a mind-mood-food connection. Ten years ago, any mind-altering effects attributed to food were considered myths; these days a respected M.I.T. researcher, author Judith Wurtman, bluntly asserts, “The right food at the right time in the right amount is as effective as a tranquilizer . . . and better for you.”

Food historian Barbara Norman might have saved Wurtman some time: “Lentil soup and pease porridge,” she writes, “were comforting people on cold nights 2500 years ago.”

A FEW COMFORTING GENERALIZATIONS: Comfort food preferences are as peculiarly individual and monotonously universal as the griefs and heartaches we seek to ameliorate. A poll taken of fast-food markets indicates that comfort food is pure kindergarten fare: apple crisp, oatmeal, pudding, ice cream, homemade bread, peanut butter and jelly, hot chocolate. On the other hand, there’s always someone like chef Jonathan Waxman, who says blinis with caviar and champagne are his comfort of choice.

Except for occasional excesses of garlic, comfort food tends to be bland enough to feed a baby. It ranges in texture from liquid (soup) to spongy, creamy to at most chewy. The rare deep-fried crunch comes from some outer layer that hides a dense and soft inside (corn fritter, doughnut).

At the other end of the spectrum--defined by one eating-disorder counselor as “anger food”--are bites that crunch, shatter, splinter or require a great deal of tooth: potato chips, hard candies, ribs. Toasted rice cakes, then, must be the ultimate anger food, not only because they shatter and crunch like crazy, but because they’re generally consumed by people who wish like hell that they were eating something else.

Some comfort foods should be eaten with the hands (toast, doughnuts, fritters), some with an oversized spoon from an oversized bowl (soups, stews, risottos , puddings). These utensils recreate a child’s perspective of cutlery. Sometimes, however, we must grow up and use a fork.

THE SAD FACT FOR SAD SACKS: Comfort food is fattening. Sorry. But it’s food that feeds the soul. As one Jungian analyst explained to me, “The subconscious still likes the idea of storing nutrients in the body for future use, it doesn’t know that it’s fashionable to be trim, but just wants to shore up against possible famine. Fat is a form of security.”

A friend, disturbed by the caloric excesses of comfort, went into a small rant recently. “What about all the people you see snacking on fresh fruit and salads all day? They have perfectly productive lives. They never eat sweets or butter or mayonnaise. They’re skinny, and healthy and perfectly happy ! You don’t see them eating all that starch and fat, do you?”

“No” I said. “And for obvious reasons. They don’t need comfort.”

SOUP: There is no soup whose curative properties have been more universally touted than chicken soup. My favorite chicken noodle soup is at the Samanluang Cafe, a Thai fast-food joint on Hollywood Boulevard at Kingsley. In a crystal-clear broth, the white meat of a chicken is steamed to perfect softness and set on a bed of white rice noodles and slightly cooked greens. The only spice is a sprinkling of golden-brown shredded garlic.

Other soups, especially creamy purees, fulfill all the requirements of starch/softness/palatability/familiarity. Those who yearn for the comfort of tomato soup but can’t subject their palates to the canned stuff should try the pappa ala pomodoro (an ancient dish of fresh tomatoes thickened with bread) at Pazzia on La Cienega. The Four Oaks Inn on Beverly Glen calls its version “Organic Red Tomato Soup with Tarragon”; it has five or six cloves of baked sweet garlic.

PASTA: I believe that the simpler the dish, the higher the pasta nurturing quotient. My idea of the best possible marriage of starch and butterfat is at Trattoria Angeli in West L.A.: A perfect, house-made linguine is sauced with sweet butter and good Parmesan. That’s it. And at Lombardo’s Cucina in Sherman Oaks there is another pasta paragon of simplicity: ricotta-stuffed ravioli with butter and fragrant fresh sage.

Lard na, the big thick gelatinous Thai noodle dish in a nice, bland gravy is comfort food, too. The best I know of can be found at Jitlada on Sunset Blvd.

RICE: Another prize starch and the principal ingredient of my personal choice of comfort in food form: risotto . I would make it at home every night if I could manage to keep both meat stock and a part-time stir cook on hand. It’s made with arborio rice--exceptionally sticky and starchy--and requires approximately 20 minutes of continuous stirring (no time for a even a quick cigarette or phone break). I believe this concentrated attention makes risotto much more comforting than jambalaya or paella or any other rice-based dish. After all, when you’re served a bowl of risotto , somebody --maybe not your mother or lover or anybody you’d even want to meet--devoted 20 minutes of their life to your bowl of food. If that alone doesn’t feed the soul, risotto is loaded with butter and Parmesan cheese. It’s chewy, it’s soft, it’s sticky and you get to shovel it in with a big old spoon.

I became a risotto fiend at Celestino in Beverly Hills. Black from squid ink, it looks like a plateful of gravel but it bursts with the flavors of fresh seafood. Pazzia on La Cienega will only stir risotto for two; but its version with little white canellini beans and a bit of rabbit liver is the most satisfying version I’ve ever had.

ROUND THINGS: Most comfort food tends to be amorphous and goopy--mashed potatoes, soup, puddings--but certain round foods impart a sense of wholeness and perfection of concept. Consider the matzo ball or falafel . My favorite round thing, however, is suppli (rice balls), often made from leftover risotto . I’ve had wonderful ones at Trattoria Angeli and at Luna Rossa on Van Nuys Blvd. Larger than a walnut and served ungarnished on a plate, they’re chewy, unabashedly bland, and they never come with sauce, because, I truly believe the only thing that improves their flavor are a few salty tears.

Doughnuts, while rather more two-dimensionally round, are neat packages of fat and flour with a nice casing of sugar. The best I’ve found are glazed and far off, at Grandad’s Donuts in Springville, California. You might consider a nice spiraling cinnamon roll, such as the cardamom-spiked variety at Au Delice Bakery in Pasadena. And we shouldn’t forget pancakes--especially Hugo’s pumpkin pancakes.

Foods that merely aspire to roundness include dumplings, hush puppies and fritters. Caffe Latte’s corn fritters (available only occasionally, unfortunately) are warm and dense, slightly crunchy and salty--a terrific cure for acute temporary stress. And Salomi, an Indian restaurant on Lankershim in North Hollywood, has an onion bhaji (actually a fried pakura ) that is a heavenly deep-fried dumpling of onion and lentils.

SWEETS: For the sad with a sweet tooth, there’s tapioca, bread pudding, rice pudding and big heavy cakes. Cafe Julienne, down in San Marino, makes a meal-sized bread pudding; count yourself lucky and cheer up, already, if you visit the cafe on a day it serves persimmon-bread pudding.

For quick pick-me-ups, Silverlake’s Tropical Ice Cream, on Sunset Boulevard, makes the best cafe con leche ; I drink it with a 25-cent slab of yellow orange cake. But for solace “in a big dog way,” as one friend says, there’s nothing more awesome than Caffe Latte’s pear ginger cake. It’s dark, it’s sweet, it’s sticky, it’s fattening and it puts you right out of your misery.

CHOCOLATE: Most of us know chocolate is famous for releasing the same body chemicals--endorphins--that are released when we’re in love, which makes it the perfect comfort food for a broken heart. When such disaster strikes, I’d suggest the hot chocolate tart at Fennel in Santa Monica. It’s not a tart, really (there’s no crust), but it has a fragile crustiness similar to what one finds on the top of a good brownie. Once the crust is cracked, a thick, warm chocolate custard oozes into a pool of pale green pistachio cream. Thoughts of lost love are impossible when you’ve got a mouthful of this stuff.

AS FOR ICE CREAM: I know that ice cream is the most often mentioned comfort food, but to be most effective, it should be eaten in bed, in front of the TV, directly out of the carton. Otherwise, there’s Pazzia’s hazelnut gelato , which can be eaten outside on the patio as one gazes wistfully at all the happy folk inside the splendid dining room.