Cold Comfort Farm

Comfort food is an odd phrase. If you get great news at work and decide to celebrate with champagne at your favourite restaurant where you always have the XYZ - that XYZ is comfort food. Equally, feeling ill and heading home early for a bowl of soup; that’s comfort food. Seeing family for lunch and having the same roast chicken you’ve had every other Sunday since 1991 is comfort food (as long as you like roast chicken, and your family). However, the worst, worst manifestation of comfort food, and the one most people will have thought of immediately, is the stereotype of a girl crying into the Haagen Daaz in her pyjamas and sloshing Pinot Grigio all over the sofa.

Only about a third of women continue to eat healthily during times of emotional stress. Apart from the odd occasion when you only eat mashed potato for 24 hours, I think this is much more likely to mean that women don’t really eat when they’re sad. As if they’re so tired or upset or just clinically fed up that they temporarily don’t care about themselves.

We all know about the Heartbreak Diet, where a friend who is going through a break up will suddenly appear looking leggy, which is envy inducing until you ask her how she is and she can’t say answer without welling up.

Here’s the bitch: for men, the urge for comfort food is apparently (I did some googling research) triggered by positive emotions, whereas for women it’s by negative ones. This means that for every man celebrating his good news in his favourite local Italian, there’s a woman in the flat next door hoofing down chocolate and deleting old photos on facebook. If life was a film, they would meet inadvertently when she runs to the shops at 11pm to pick up another bottle just as he’s leaving the restaurant, and they would then be In Love. But it isn’t a film, so she will develop a short term alcohol problem, and he will probably grab a cab home.

The Wikipedia article on comfort food (as always, to be read with a pinch of salt please) only gives examples of comfort foods from the USA, Canada and Indonesia, which seems a little reductive, if eclectic. The page did, however, alert me to the fact that Kraft (they of the plastic cheese slices) make something called a ‘microwavable dinner cup’ in the flavour ‘Extreme Cheese Explosion’ which I am genuinely desperate to try.

However, it was either Rousseau or Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall who said, “food that weighs heavy on the stomach, often weighs rather heavy on the soul too”, and the last thing you need when you’re feeling miserable is to feel stuffed as well. One of my favourite comfort foods ever is something I call, excitingly, ‘Egg Smash!’, which is where you soft boil 2 eggs, peel them and then just smush them up in a mug with salt, pepper and parmesan. Eat that, watch some crap TV, get an early night.

What I’m trying to say is that for me, comfort food doesn’t automatically mean macaroni cheese. In fact I have to be in a pretty convivial mood to want to relax and eat pasta and drink wine and chat. Recently, my godmother took me for lunch at Hush, which is not only owned by Roger Moore’s son, but is also where they have a truffled macaroni cheese with bacon (what an elegant segway into the food part).

I’m not normally a fan of f**king with the formula, but an easy way of making macaroni cheese as special as you deserve at home (assuming you don’t want to buy a truffle…) is to try the recipe below which is based on Lorraine Pascale’s ‘Glam Mac and Cheese’. I have adapted it a bit because she did include a few weird things, and none of my sisters like parsley. Full disclaimer: she used to be a model so probably doesn’t eat it very often. Also, serve it with salad or your arteries will turn into cheese.

Pimped Macaroni Cheese
Serves 4

You will need:
340g macaroni
80g pancetta
100g breadcrumbs
-handful of chopped thyme

For the cheese sauce:
40g butter
40g plain flour
1 tsp mustard powder
200ml milk
285ml double cream
200g dolcelatte
115g parmesan

-Preheat the oven to 200c
-Cook the macaroni until just underdone (it will cook more in the oven) and drain
-Fry the pancetta and thyme and add to the pasta
-For the sauce, start by making the roux. Melt the butter and mix in the flour. Add the milk and cream little by little, stirring constantly. Turn up the heat and boil it for a few minutes to thicken.
-Add most of the dolcelatte and parmesan to the mixture and stir well. Season.
-Pour the sauce over the pasta and combine.
-Spoon the mixture into a casserole dish.
-Sprinkle the remaining cheese and breadcrumbs over the top and bake for 20-30 minutes.

So, in conclusion, it may be the end of November. It may be that the weather forecast for the next three months is going to say cold, windy, dark and rainy. It may be that the moon is in the 7th phase of Zoroaster and the Mayans got it right. But it will probably all be ok in the end.

And I will leave you with the thought that the best thing in the whole world is a glass of wine with a friend*

*JUST ONE. DO NOT GET DRUNK IT WILL NOT HELP.