I Find Comfort Here
The assistance, assurance, safety and pleasure food can provide is a wondrous thing. It’s like zipping up your hoodie on a windy day, jamming your hands in your pockets when you’re not sure what to do with them, plugging in and blasting music in your ears on a long bus ride — it calms you and make you feel…safe. When people talk about comfort food, it is very often about food that, regardless of taste, evokes these feelings of security and familiarity. Usually these dishes are what mum used to cook, what warms our tummies on rainy days, what reminds us of carefree youth, friendship, even romance. Everyone’s idea of comfort food is different, but each brings with it a unique memory of assurance.
In recent years, my comfort foods have become more and more associated with my travels, with moments that are seemingly dull and nondescript, the stuff you won’t be so eager to share on social media with everyone. It’s quite odd that simple food eaten in a foreign land can grow to become part of a collection of comforting, edible memories.
In India, it was silently huddling with a group of strangers around the chai walla (the uncle who makes tea) in the morning, taking turns to reach our hands out to have our cups filled. We would share that same space for just a few minutes, drinking the same tea that was getting us all ready for the day ahead, before we each smashed our clay cups by the drain and parted ways. In Iran, it was sharing a large disc of freshly baked bread with the driver, subconsciously creating a rhythm as I tore off chunks in between flipping the pages of my book while he grabbed handfuls in between changing gears, crumbs dropping everywhere as we blazed through the desert. When the bread was finished, we would silently pass around the box of dates I had in my backpack, a box that would last 2 weeks spanning different cities and feeding different hungry drivers along the way. In Kyrgyzstan, it was sharing warm bowls of milk tea in the middle of a long drive towards the border. We had dropped off an elderly lady along the way as a favour, and all eight of us in the minivan got out to receive the tea the lady’s granddaughter had prepared. It was their humble way of thanking us. It may have been the best bowl of milk tea I’d ever had, and definitely the first I’d shared with so many strangers. In Ethiopia, it was the injera and shiro we ordered the moment we stepped into any eatery, bar — even an Italian restaurant. You see, those dishes are their comfort foods, and everyone knows how to make them. This quickly made it our comfort food, our safety net. Perhaps it was not the food itself that was particularly comforting, but instead the feeling of being connected to strangers in a foreign land, a connection facilitated by food.
But aside from those far flung experiences, there is one memory from home that defines comfort for me. It is a scene of sitting cross-legged on the floor of a university hostel room, either mine or a friend’s, many pairs of chopsticks darting into tom yum broth, a desperate search for cheese tofu and crab sticks from a hot pot. Surrounded by teammates, we were ravenous after training and grocery shopping for the cheapest steamboat ingredients, with no sense of personal space and a shared mission of stuffing each other’s bowls with more food. Every few months, we had these steamboat sessions followed by hours and hours of playing “Murderer”, nights that at that time, I never thought I’d miss or remember. Looking back, there really was no better way to form a connection, to feel like you’re bonding over nothing, to be so deeply comforted. So maybe, yes, perhaps the best chais are sipped on the street with strangers, the best durians are eaten in the car with your impatient family, the best pratas eaten at 2am with your friends, the best double-boiled soups are sipped on alone in a country far away from home, and sometimes, the best steamboats are eaten on a hostel floor.
If you’re feeling the need for some safety and assurance, these guides may be of assistance.
