Of Comfort and Food

better living through pasta

Sundays were for food. Sure, they were for gatherings, but the gatherings centered around food; the preparing, the cooking, the serving, the eating, the cleaning up. Sundays at grandma’s were a ritual and that ritual revolved around pasta and gravy (always gravy, never sauce) and meatballs and wine and cousins. There was a certain comfort in that ritual, and I came to associate the pasta and all its accouterments with a good, warm feeling.

My grandparents’ house - now my house - was a place filled with joyful noise. Whether it was grandkids playing hide-and-seek or grandpa singing Jimmy Roselli or the aunts and uncles engaging in a raucous card game, there was always noise. If you wanted quiet and respite, you went home. If you wanted boisterousness, you hung out at grandma’s.

Every Sunday we’d gather at the house on the corner, the one with the breezeway and expansive front lawn. We didn’t need a holiday to get together; each Sunday was its own holiday of sorts, one we made up together. There would be pasta. There would be meatball and sausage and braciola and bread. We’d meet up at 3:00, all of us arriving once, cousins clamoring to be the one who got to stir the gravy while the others would set the table or pull the meatballs and sausage out the huge gravy pot. Everyone chipped in and we did it eagerly because the faster we set up, the faster we got to sit down and eat.

There would be wine - red, red, wine, poured out of giant jugs by my grandfather into small glasses filled with sliced peaches. Grandma hate the wine; it was her nemesis. She would hide the jugs when Grandpa wasn’t looking but to no avail. He’d always find them - in the closet or under the kitchen sink - and he’d willingly share with us when he recovered his jugs.

The scenario was the same each week: we’re sitting at Grandma’s table; there’s me, my sister and six or seven cousins. Grandpa has his jug out and, per usual, pours us each a small glass of wine. Grandma walks into the kitchen and sees us sitting there, in Alla Salute! pose, ready to drink. She glares at grandpa, a long, evil stare, and you know that she’s silently conjuring up evil curses.

Grandpa snickers, doesn’t even give Grandma the satisfaction of acknowledging her evil stare. He just picks up a peach and paring knife and starts slicing. He drops one slice into each of our glasses and then looks at grandma, smiling.

“It’s just fruit. They’re just having a treat,” he says.

He gives us a nod and we all follow his lead; we dip our fingers into the glasses, pull out the wine-soaked peach slices, and slide them into our mouths as if they were the greatest treat on earth. Which they just might have been at the time. Grandma mutters Italian curse words under her breath and we all get a good laugh about it while we drank our wine.

It was part of our ritual. Cooking, preparing, drinking, eating. Gathering.

While our gatherings, especially the Sunday ones, were about being together as family, they were also about the food. Birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, they all were reason to gather, to collect ourselves at grandma’s house, to feast.

From the fish dishes on Christmas Eve to ham on Christmas, the Thanksgiving turkey, the summer birthday barbecues, we centered ourselves around food because food brought us as much comfort as the people we shared the meals with. To this day, a big bowl of pasta and gravy and meatballs provides me warmth. The act of making the meal, of stirring the gravy, shaping the meatballs, having the aroma fill my house the way it did when this was my grandparents’ house, it all brings me back to a time when things were simple and easy, when we gathered en masse to celebrate not just holidays, but regular old Sundays. We celebrated the food. We celebrated ourselves.

I often eat now to recreate moods, emotions. I eat my way out of distress. I survived near breakdowns by cooking and eating pasta and gravy. The smell of the meal cooking, the process of making it, took my mind off other things and brought to mind a place where life was damn near idyllic, when family was gathered and I felt loved and nourished. I still try to feed my emotions with calories, to recreate a sense of well being by eating, because eating is in my mind a ritual that means warmth, love, family — even when doing it alone. Eating, especially eating comfort foods, is an act of self preservation. It quells my depression, it soothes my anxiety.

There were many other comfort foods that brought me joy besides the Sunday pasta along the way to adulthood. My mother’s mashed potatoes on holidays. My father’s chili on a snowy day. Grilled cheese and soup after school. Cereal on a Sunday evening. Waffles and ice cream in front of the tv. All these foods represented a feeling of comfort and I spent a good portion of my young adult/adult life trying to replicate that comfort when I needed it. And it seemed like I always needed it. When my depression was at its worst, I sought comfort in food. When my anxiety peaked, I looked to comfort foods to calm me down. When my mood swings hit a low cycle, it was the comfort foods of my youth — and foods I found comfort in later on — that buoyed me.

There’s something about living in the house that was my grandparents’ that compels me to make a big Sunday dinner even though it’s just the two of us. I can’t recreate the gatherings - we’ve all gone our separate ways at this point - but I can recreate the food. And in a larger sense, that’s all I need.

[photo by me]

[tell me about your comfort foods]