IN victory, I deserve it, in defeat, I need it,’ said Sir Winston Churchill of his favorite tipple, Champagne. When the chips are down, however, most of us need a bit more ballast than a bottle of Pol Roger can provide. Chips, in fact, will do nicely—preferably with ketchup as well as mayonnaise—as will most variations on the tuber. On those days when the world feels an unfriendly place, where better to retreat than beneath a fluffy, 15-tog duvet of mashed potato, melded blissfully with lots of butter and cream?
‘Nothing like mashed potatoes when you’re feeling blue,’ declares Rachel in Heartburn, Nora Ephron’s thinly disguised novel about the breakdown of her marriage to the Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein. As Rachel, a food writer, picks over the bones of the relationship, her ruminations are interspersed with some of her favorite recipes. Potatoes (three ways), bacon hash (bacon, egg, yet more potatoes), pot roast and bread pudding, dishes she describes as ‘nursery food’.
Our notions of comfort food are ‘bound up in nostalgia and childhood memories,’ says food writer and historian Angela Clutton.
They’re dishes that ‘take us back to a supposedly simpler and happier time’. In times of stress or turmoil, she will turn to ‘roast chicken, shepherd’s pie, rhubarb sponge— the foods of my childhood, which still give me so much pleasure to cook and eat now’.
Comfort food is unpretentious fare, the antithesis of molecular gastronomy or the Nordic foraged-food thing. It’s the culinary equivalent of a big, bosomy hug from a beloved grandmother, transporting you straight back to her kitchen. Pastry scraps rolled out on a flour-speckled farmhouse table, dogs dozing in their baskets, the warm fug of cinnamon emanating from the Aga.
Denne historien er fra May 27, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra May 27, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
