Comfort food is great, but have you tried comforting food?

Since the start of the pandemic, comfort foods have reigned supreme. In times of stress, people turn to the foods that made them feel good, whether it is a throwback dish that reminds them of home or something with a lot of fat, carbs, sugar, or all three. While eating carbohydrate-rich and fat-laden dishes is satisfying, I think there is something even better than comfort food: comforting food.

There is a difference between these other than one is a verb and the other a present participle – comfort foods make you feel good when you eat them but comforting foods make you feel good when you make them. You don’t even have to eat them to get the effect. In fact, sometimes there’s more comfort in the making, especially when you are sharing them with family or friends.

Comforting foods are recipes that feel like a well-worn pair of jeans that conform to your body – recipes where you grab ingredients by instinct and let muscle memory guide you through the technique. Chopping, mixing, and stirring provide the rhythm while the colors, aromas, and textures of the ingredients add melody to this relaxing symphony. Tensions ease, breathing slows, and the chaos seems ordered, even if only briefly.

Although I love trying new things, I keep a handful of comforting recipes in my repertoire so they always stay fresh in my memory. Many are on the sweet side (cinnamon rolls, puff pastry, Italian meringue buttercream, and lemon curd, to name just a few) but there are plenty of savory dishes as well (Chicken shawarma pie, raspberry walnut vinaigrette, flammekueche, salade niçoise, chicken Parmigiana, and more). The thread that ties these recipes together is that they each have multiple steps and involve a fair amount of busywork – making the turns in the puff pastry; cooking chicken, roasting potatoes, layering phyllo, and making tahini sauce for the shawarma pie; individually cooking items for the niçoise and composing them all on the plate – you get the idea. The process matters as much as the outcome, because that’s where much of the comfort resides. Long live comforting foods.