"[It's] the original Italian comfort food and one of the more famous of Italy’s many peasant dishes that are also worthy of kings. There are as many versions of this dish as there are regions in Italy and each is a little different based upon the availability of ingredients or which cut of pasta is preferred."
When Bill Cosby dines at the Mansion at Turtle Creek in Dallas, he always orders a big bowl of chili, according to chef Dean Fearing. Along with many Americans, it's his comfort food. People may envision frequent travelers feasting on exotic dishes during their journeys, but most get tired of fancy restaurant cuisines. They just want a meal that reminds them of the comforts of home.My mother used to make a wonderful chili from scratch, full of beef and kidney beans. I haven't had a bowl in more than twenty years but I can almost taste it still. Of course, mom's chili - as with most chilis - provided little that might be called "comfort" hours after ingestion, but if I can dig up the recipe I'll post it here.
"Comfort food is familiar food," says Noah Bekofsky, executive chef at the Aria restaurant in the Fairmont Chicago Hotel. "They are foods we associate with positive memories in our lives."
"Comfort foods are foods whose consumption evoke a psychologically pleasurable state for a person," reported Brian Wansink, an Illinois marketing professor who heads the Food and Brand Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Drawing from national survey questionnaires, the lab has concluded that a person’s comfort-food preferences are formed at an early age and are triggered, in addition to hunger, by conditioned associations and gender differences.So, what does it say about a person if, in the throes of satisfying a comfort food craving, he or she follows up a big plate of pasta with some Godiva chocolates?
Men, for example, find comfort in foods associated with meals prepared by their mothers (mashed potatoes, pasta, meat, and soup) rather than from snacks and sweets (excepting ice cream).
But what is comfort for men is work for women. "Because adult females are not generally accustomed to having hot food prepared for them and as children saw the female as the primary food preparer, they tend to gain psychological comfort from less labor-intensive foods such as chocolate, candy and ice cream," Wansink said. Indeed, one study found that 92 percent of self-reported "chocolate addicts" were female.
Evolutionarily, the drive to eat comfort foods makes sense, says Norman Pecoraro, co-author of the study. In the animal kingdom, it's an eat or be eaten world, and a body under constant, or chronic, stress may preferentially eat high-energy foods to stay in the game. Under the model that the research team has proposed, glucocorticoids would both prompt vigilance to threats and send a signal to the brain of a chronically stressed animal to seek high-energy food. If it were successful in finding such food, stress and its attendant feelings would be terminated.So if you, too, are feeling stressed like so many of us, stop and eat a chocolate chip cookie. Just be sure to follow it up with a glass of milk and a couple miles on the treadmill.
In regions of the world where people struggle with wars, epidemics of disease and chronic food shortage, the need to seek out high-energy foods would be great, as well. In the developed world, where stress is more often found in a commuting office worker, people seem to be seeking the same solution and finding it at every street corner.
