Comfort Eating (eBook)

I am laying out frozen McCain chips on a baking sheet while the oven preheats to 200 degrees – or thereabouts. These chips might go in early, as I’m very hungry, despite having spent a day at the MasterChef studios being presented with the finest plates of culinary prowess: a haunch of venison with celeriac three ways with a Malbec jus, and a kumquat soufflé with freshly churned Madagascan vanilla ice cream. It was finickity, fancy food delivered by very stressed chefs, their tension palpable as they entered the room. The eating session was long, with there being four contestants and eight courses, but due to the realities of TV, I only ate very small amounts of very rich things. Now I’m home, and my stomach is rumbling. What I need is some proper dinner, or my ‘tea’ as I’d have called it when I first began making this recipe.

I need comfort food.

The oven chips are nearly ready now. Their plastic bag is returned to the top drawer of the freezer cabinet, alongside Birds Eye potato waffles, Asda cheese and garlic ciabatta slices, Magnums and a Warburtons Toastie white loaf, in what my other half Charlie and I call ‘the Drawer of Deliciousness’. This is the drawer full of things a frazzled individual can rely on when life feels difficult: bready things, potatoey things, buttery things; sweet things to soothe and cheesy things that melt in strings and cling to your chin as you watch Police Interceptors on Channel 5. Sometimes a human being just wants comfort food they can make on autopilot. They want tastes and textures that will fill their stomach and make it tell their brain that everything is going to be all right. ‘Just eat your tea,’ it says, ‘and go to bed. Tomorrow is another day.’

I throw the crispy brown chips in a bowl – they’re far too hot to pick up, but I do it anyway, wincing – then hurl Saxa salt at them straight from the canister, followed by some Sarson’s malt vinegar. This is no time for the finest pink sea salt fetched from the Himalayas or balsamic from Modena. No. I take a jar of Bisto gravy granules and put two heaped teaspoons into a mug and stir in boiling water. Instant gravy! I cover the chips in the slippery stuff. Then, finally, I finish my pièce de résistance with blobs of green mint sauce. Just opening that jar sends me back to Sunday dinners as a child.

I take dinner on a tray to the living room, where I eat it alone, wearing mismatched pyjama top and bottoms, surrounded by the remnants of today’s TV glamour: stripped-off false eyelashes, piles of geisha hair grips, clip-in hair extensions draped over chair arms that look like small feral creatures, high heels, a push-up bra and piles of cotton wool I’ve used to take off a three-tone eyeshadow.

All these things are fake, just smoke and mirrors for telly. But what is on my plate is sheer reality. This bowl of brown and green is a dollop of nostalgia. It’s Mam’s Sunday dinners, it’s a bell ringing at school in the eighties, and a laugh with friends about last night’s Blackadder. It has echoes of walking home from the Twisted Wheel nightclub in Carlisle with the lasses in the eighties, too, where a kiosk in the wall near the Citadel would serve pie, chips and peas with ladles of gravy for £1.50. We’d clutch our polystyrene trays, tipsy, half-naked in spandex, and walk the two miles home in Dolcis kitten heels and body glitter. We felt invincible.

Even though those days are long gone, I’ll never stop being fascinated by the things we eat when nobody’s watching. They say so much about us. Yes, you could say that we’re just mindlessly popping things in a minimart plastic bag, taking them home to be warmed up and eaten. But I’ve realised it isn’t mindless, actually: so often we are recreating childhood or teenage family life, our uni days or that specific flat we shared with our closest friends. Sometimes these foods are plain weird – Hula Hoops dipped in Tiptree jam or custard creams with Primula cheese – but often they’re plain things that offer solace: hot buttered toast with the butter spread lavishly under Marmite comes to mind. These things remind you of home in some way, and that is the very essence of comfort eating.

In a world filled with overwhelming choice, there is a pleasure in knowing one’s own mind. We are made to feel shameful for eating the exact same lunch every day, or for knowing what we want from the local takeaway before even looking at a menu. We’re shamed for being boring, as if the very wise deviate and experiment at every meal. I disagree. Eating the same thing again and again and again and expecting – or in fact relishing – the exact same results is the definition of sanity, not insanity.

By now I’m sure you’re asking, ‘But Grace, what is this book really about?’ Well, put simply, it’s a bid to understand why certain foods make us comforted and happy. It’s about why we lean on cheese, potato, pasta, butter and sugary treats to make us feel safe, and why some tastes, textures, packets and boxes just feel right. It’s answering some big questions: why does a blue, yellow and red striped box of Bird’s trifle spark joy? Why do the orange parts of a Double Decker wrapper fill me with delight? And why do I never come home after an emotionally hard day and fancy a spinach salad, even if it was whipped up by Gordon Ramsay himself?

I should also say what this book isn’t. This isn’t an excuse to never eat fruit and vegetables because ‘Grace Dent said I can live on Rustlers microwavable quarter pounders.’ It also isn’t a weight-loss or weight-gain plan. It is not a beach body ready cut-out-and-keep chart, nor is it a method to achieve eternal life via bouts of intermittent fasting. At no stage over the following chapters will I reveal secrets to my sensuous beauty via omitting nightshades and legumes or existing solely on ‘organ meat’; I also won’t discuss any plans to ‘enter ketosis’ and develop breath like Satan’s bum in order to gain a smaller waist. This book will not lead you to be photographed standing sideways in a pair of very loose trousers claiming I changed your life. This book is not a claim that I am any better or worse than you as a human being – in fact, please never see me as a good example, but instead more as a terrible warning. It isn’t a lobbying job for fast food companies because I am secretly in the pocket of Big Chicken, and neither is it a lobbying job against fast food as I am also a shill for Big Tofu. I do not think any of the foodstuffs or brands I’ll talk about in this book are purely good or bad for you.

I just think that they … are.

They exist.

Vividly.

And many of them have been in my life from the very start. As familiar as friends, and as loyal as family. I just know that at Ramadan, when I see a giant stack of Ferrero Rocher in Leyton Mills Asda, I feel something. I feel excited. I don’t even observe Ramadan, and I don’t particularly love Ferrero Rocher, and I know beyond doubt that refined carbs are not my friend … but at the same time there is comfort and jubilation in those fancy gold and brown wrappers. There is happiness, safety, the memory of my parents passing a box around, and the feeling of a treat.

And I just need to talk about it. Especially now, of all times.

On 1 February 2021, my mother, queen of the comfort eaters, finally died, not long after finishing a round of toast and marmalade. I say ‘finally’ as it had been on the cards for a long time, but as a stubborn Cumberland woman she had more comebacks than Lazarus. The woman was eighty-five and as sharp as a tack until about two days before the end, when she saw my Aunty Beet in the doorway of her bedroom as we sat together on a late Sunday afternoon. Beet had been dead at least thirty-five years.

Up until then, though, it felt like Mam would go on for ever. She had far too much to do: scones to eat, yellow reduced-price stickers to hunt down at Morrisons and piles of Celebration chocolates to feed to her grandchildren. But in November 2020, with tumours in almost every meaningful part of her body, I moved into the back room of her small retirement flat for what neither of us could quite admit was the final push. Eventually we had to name it. She looked at me while we lay in her bed together and said, ‘I don’t want to leave you all,’ and I nodded and said, ‘We’ll be all right,’ as if I was giving her the go-ahead to move on to where she needed to go, saying that I was ready to take it all on, that I’d be the captain. What I really wanted to say as I stood in her little kitchen making toast was, ‘Mam, don’t go. Please don’t go, I can’t do it. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m not ready.’

Our last weeks were spent together, and we did what we liked to do best: watch daytime telly about home improvement and eat fruit loaf and slices of pie. And lots and lots of white toast: buttered white Toastie loaf toast coated with the cheap marmalade she loved. My mother’s ultimate comfort food was the cheapest of the cheap marmalade, the stuff you could find for twenty-two pence, although she...