A recent NYTimes Cooking newsletter from Melissa Clark drew my attention to the article about Raghavan Iyer by Kim Severson 

Mr. Iyer’s debilitating cancer treatment gave him the idea for the Revival Project, a searchable database of comfort-food recipes, with the goal of nourishing patients with dishes suited to their specific origins, preferences and medical conditions.

The recipes are organized by cuisine and medical condition, that hospital and other health care workers could use.

Before his first surgery, Mr.Iyer made dozens of idli and froze them so that his partner Terry  Erickson could easily warm them up when he returned home to recuperate.

“Idli nourished me from the inside out,” Mr. Iyer said.

It was this experience that led to the Revival Project  – comfort-food recipes, organized by cuisine and medical condition, that hospital and other health care workers can use.

What a great idea!

Idli is a spongy South Indian breakfast staple made by fermenting and steaming rice. I’ve never made it but it was a routine choice along with masala dosa and lassi at my favorite restaurant in London back in the day.

The Sree Krishna on Tooting High Street was the first South Indian restaurant in London. It opened in 1973 and I soon became a regular. It has now closed after 43 years in business. It was the Sree Krishna (and the cooking of Wendy Hewing) that made me a fan of Indian food, spices, and dishes. It was a taste awakening. One of the first of many. 

Of course – one person’s comfort food may well be another’s exotic adventure in new cuisine. Which of course is Mr. Iyer’s point.

His comfort foods include; idli and sambar, yogurt and bowls of brothy rasam. 

My own range of go-to comfort food tends to be rather narrow and I’m not sure how nutritious and sustaining it would be in the long run:  Marmite, a boiled egg, tomato soup, baked beans on wholemeal toast for example. However, it does extend to spicy red lentil soup (which is basically dahl); gently steamed peas and runner beans just picked from the garden with fresh mint and a dab of butter; leeks baked under a crust of mashed spuds (improved by a side heaping of baked beans), and a baked potato with a slice of cheddar (ditto).

And even a nut roast heavy with sage and onion although I’ve not had one of those since childhood Christmas dinner days. And a hefty piece of lardy cake to round it all out. Haute cuisine it ain’t.

Just as there is comfort food so there is comfort reading. You know, those books you turn to when your need a brain rest or when under stress, or feeling poorly, off-color, under the weather, not up to par, indisposed, seedy, and generally in need of something distracting that is familiar and does not demand too much concentration.

I recently found Miss Marple was just the ticket. But other choices could have been a binge on Rumpole of the Bailey or a solid dose of P.G.Wodehouse. Pride and Prejudice is another candidate – or the first third of Great Expectations. Always a pleasure to read – and, when familiar enough, it’s emotional satisfaction without mental taxation. 

It’s the predictability that helps. You may not know whodunnit, but you know how Miss Marple will find out. You may not know the specifics of Rumpole’s brief but you know there will be a parallel kerfuffle in chambers politics at Equity Court, and home life with “she who must be obeyed”. You may not know how Bertie will be saved from matrimony, but you know he will. 

There are stock figures and running jokes to keep you soothed and amused.

Disheveled, rumpled Rumpole will defend the underdog, mutter rude comments at the mad bull of the Bailey, drink Chateau Thames Embankment at Pommeroys wine bar, quote from Keats and Wordsworth, and make sarcastic rejoinders to the long-suffering Hilda’s home greeting: “Is that you Rumpole”? (“Good heavens, no, it’s the Lord High Chancellor popped in to read the gas meter.”)

It’s all cozy, reassuring, and reliable as a plate of baked beans or a favorite sweater. 

And it’s the same with P.G.Wodehouse.

The Blandings and Jeeves and Wooster novels follow a familiar formula. The ridiculously named members of the Drones Club –  Pongo Twistleton, Freddie Threepwood, Bingo Little, Freddie Widgeon, Monty Bodkin, Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps, Stiffy Byng, Tuppy Glossop, Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, Gussie Fink-Nottle et al – get into romantic and ridiculous escapades with assorted young women, financial difficulties with relatives and trouble with aunts – Agatha and Dahlia. Bertram Wilberforce Wooster is not the brainiest of chaps but he does follow the Code of the Woosters: 

Convoluted schemes mean that Bertie invariably ends up in the bouillon of potential matrimony and has to be rescued by Jeeves who will shimmer into sight to save the day. The best-laid plans always go awry and much comic mayhem ensues.

The resolution often includes the price that Bertie must pay which usually means that he must bow to Jeeves’ superior dress sense and forego the outlandish fashion item – the bright scarlet cummerbund, the brown check suit,  the flashy tie –  that did not meet with Jeeves approval. 

Bertie returns from Cannes with white mess-jacket with brass buttons. Jeeves finds it as he is unpacking:

He now rose, holding a white object. And at the sight of it, I realized that another of our domestic crises had arrived, another of those unfortunate clashes of will between two strong men, and that Bertram, unless he remembered his fighting ancestors and stood up for his rights, was about to be put upon…. ever since I had stepped aboard the Blue Train at Cannes station, I had been wondering on and off how mine would go with Jeeves.

“Yes, Jeeves?” I said. “Something on your mind, Jeeves?”
“I fear that you inadvertently left Cannes in the possession of a coat belonging to some other gentleman, sir.”
I switched on the steely a bit more.
“No, Jeeves,” I said, in a level tone, “the object under advisement is mine. I bought it out there.”
“You wore it, sir?”
“Every night.”
“But surely you are not proposing to wear it in England, sir?”
I saw that we had arrived at the nub.
“Yes, Jeeves.”
“But, sir—-“
“You were saying, Jeeves?”
“It is quite unsuitable, sir.” – Right Ho, Jeeves

“What do ties matter, Jeeves, at a time like this?’
“There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter” – Very Good, Jeeves! 

“There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, ‘Do trousers matter?'”
“The mood will pass, sir.” The Code of the Woosters

Bertie may be a “mentally negligible” chinless wonder, but he’s a brilliant first-person narrator. At the heart of all the anarchic stories of madcap drama is the fizzy fun of the language and the dialogue. It’s full of contrasts, puns, distorted literary references, slang, and linguistic twists and turns.

“He had been looking like a dead fish.  He now looked like a deader fish, one of last year’s, cast up on some lonely beach and left there at the mercy of the wind and tides.”. – Right Ho Jeeves

“I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”– The Code of the Woosters

“You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.” Carry on, Jeeves

“It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can’t help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet.” – Jeeves in the Morning

“What does Mr Bassington-Bassington look like?”
“It is hardly my place, sir, to criticize the facial peculiarities of your friends.” –  The Inimitable Jeeves

P.G.Wodehouse is an extremely clever and funny writer

“She looked like something that might have occurred to Ibsen in one of his less frivolous moments.”. – Summer Lightning

“A girl who bonnets a policeman with an ashcan full of bottles is obviously good wife-and-mother timber.” – The Plot That Thickened

“The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G.K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin.” Mr.Mulliner Speaking

“He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.” The Man Upstairs & Other Stories

“It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three-quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.” The Girl in Blue

There is a Limit

Usually, about three books in a row are enough to cure the need for sedation. Just as one might tire of a daily diet of baked beans after a few months, you can only take many such books in any one stretch. And anyway, you do have to save some for later. 

For a whole chunk of years in childhood, my go-to comfort book in times of a cold or ‘flu was Erich Kästner’s  Emil and the Detectives. I must have read more than half a dozen times. Emil had a favorite food – macaroni and cheese with ham. 

ChatGPT

I asked the artificial intelligence language bot ChatGPT about the critical reception of the book. It warned me that it was full of racist stereotypes and that the portrayal of the villain Grundeis, a moneylender, is anti-semitic.  

All of this is wildly inaccurate. The bot is way more unreliable than Wikipedia. On that, more anon.

Meanwhile, I think I’ll treat myself to a quick read of The Code of the Woosters. The good thing about Wodehouse is that he was so prolific you can generally find one you haven’t read or have completely forgotten. 

What is your go-to comfort food?

Do you have comfort books? Or TV or film series?

What do you find yourself reading or watching when concentration is difficult and you need something predictable and not too demanding?