Feel Good Foods

In good times or bad, it’s great to turn to your favourite comfort dish. Some Albertans discuss the meals that never disappoint

By Noemi LoPinto

It might be spaghetti and meatballs, a grilled cheese sandwich or homemade chicken soup. It could be fried chicken, tofu and beans or a hamburger with all the toppings. Whatever your comfort food, you are likely to turn to it no matter what your stage of life: after scraping your five-year-old knees at the park, at the pinnacle of your career or when you find yourself in the doghouse with your significant other.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell what an authentic comfort food is. The dishes that bring smiles to our faces are as individual as the memories of the places people come from.

When Rahma Ahmed, 32, first came to Canada 10 years ago, she had no idea if she’d be able to find the smells and tastes of her Somali childhood: cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, coriander, cumin and saffron. After relocating to Calgary three years ago, she was delighted to find what she needed.

“To be honest, I’m an emotional eater,” Ahmed says. “When I get sad or happy I run to the fridge and I eat. But whenever I feel like eating something special, I make sambusas.”

Sambusa, a Somali version of the Indian samosa, is a popular snack, especially during the Islamic month of Ramadan. During the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, many Muslims pray and fast during daylight hours. For Ahmed, sambusas are one of the dishes used to break the fast at sundown.

Ahmed’s version of the south Asian treat is a triangle of fried pastry, filled with spiced hot green peppers and ground beef. She makes the dough herself at home, (beginners can use prepared spring roll wrappers) flavours the meat with salt, chopped onions, hot peppers and garlic. Then she wraps the mixture in the triangles of raw pastry and fries them in oil. In three to five minutes, they’re ready.

“Hot, crunchy, spicy - I love them,” she says. “I make them once a week. East Indians make samosas too, but they’re different. They’re often vegetarian. Our sambusas are more delicious, trust me.”

Somali cuisine comes from a mixture of influences, such as Ethiopian, Middle Eastern, colonial British and Italian. Life was hard in Ahmed’s native country. She grew up under a military regime in Hargeisa, a city in the northern end of the country. Tap water was only available once a day, early in the mornings. Ahmed’s mother would get up every day at 3 a.m. hoping to fill bottles with enough water to feed and bathe a family of eight. Sometimes there was only enough to fill one bottle but her mother had her priorities straight - food came first.

“It didn’t affect the cooking as much as the showering,” says Ahmed with a laugh.

Lunch was the most important meal; at noon, the whole family would sit on a small carpet to eat and talk. A typical meal would be rice or noodles with sauce, a traditional stew eaten with flat bread or chapatti-like bread called sabayad, which Ahmed also makes at home for her husband and three sons.

“In my culture, food is made for people who work,” she says. “It’s very filling, heavy and oily. Sometimes you can hardly move afterwards.”

Ahmed started learning how to cook when she was nine years old, but didn’t make sambusas until she was living in Canada. With her mother still in Africa, preparing the little pastries became part of her family ritual, a tactile and delicious way of returning to the safety of her mother’s kitchen.

Food takes you back in a way that other triggers don’t. When you’re looking at a photograph, for example, you are merely revisiting a visual, without smells or other sensations. With food, you actually experience a complicated combination of memory-triggering senses in the nose, throat and mouth. Olfactory cells, a tiny patch of tissue high up in the nose, connect directly to the brain. Taste buds in the mouth and throat react to food or drink mixed with saliva and send information to nearby nerve fibres, which also send messages to the brain.

There are four basic taste sensations: sweet, sour, bitter and salty. Combinations of these, along with texture, temperature and odour, allow us to tell the difference between crackers and cake. Many flavours are recognized mainly through smell. If you plug your nose while eating, you will have trouble identifying flavours (though you can distinguish sweet from bitter). This is why professional food tasters exhale through the nose before and after swallowing. Add all this physical data to the memories your brain generates as you eat, and it’s no surprise that food is such a great emotional trigger.

The smell of hot chocolate brings Kaye Cebuliak back to her childhood in Mundare, Alberta. Born to Polish-Ukrainian parents in the 1930s, Cebuliak lived on a farm with nine siblings. She walked three miles to school every day. One of her most vivid memories is of the hot chocolate her teacher would prepare for students on cold winter mornings. Cows’ milk from neighbouring farms was warmed slowly in a big cooking pot on a stove in the corner of the one-room school. All morning, the smell of hot, sweet chocolate milk would permeate the children’s clothes and drive them to distraction with anticipation.

“I can almost smell the chocolate now,” she says from her sunny, spacious kitchen in Edmonton’s Capilano area. “Winters were cold then. It took a lot of energy to stay warm. The children brought the wood in and set the fire. The teacher stirred the milk until it was hot and we drank it at lunchtime when it was cool enough.”

Cebuliak also remembers the smells and tastes of entire weekends spent in the kitchen watching her mother and sisters bake Ukrainian delicacies; berry-filled pies and cakes, fresh baked bread, cinnamon buns and doughnuts. Her mother baked 12 loaves of bread a week, every week without fail, she says. When Kaye was married and living in Edmonton, she did the same for her four sons. “I baked for years and years,” she says. “Bread, cinnamon buns and doughnuts were favourites. I cooked whatever the kids liked. I baked bushel after bushel of doughnuts. I could see the kids come running down the street after school with their noses up, smelling around the corner to see what I was baking.”

Traditional Ukrainian cuisine is not for the faint of heart: it’s heavy on breads, doughy dumplings and meat. Influenced by their German, Russian and Polish neighbours, many traditional dishes, such as Borscht, blintzes, and perogies, are common to most Slavic countries. Bread, a staple, comes in many shapes, sizes and with ceremonial decorations, depending on the season and occasion.

Now that her sons are grown and have their own families, Cebuliak’s comfort food is whatever treat her grandkids ask for. Her fridge is always stocked with perogies, pyrinzhky, cabbage rolls stuffed with minced meat and rice, cottage cheese fritters and cornmeal casserole. “Nowadays these are not just Ukrainian dishes,” she says. “You can go to any restaurant or grocery store and order them. But I like to be ready in case someone drops by.”

In a 2005 study on comfort foods, published in the medical journal Physiology and Behavior, Cornell and McGill University researchers used the internet to survey 277 male and female participants about comfort foods. They found that women are prone to turn to foods high in fat and sugar, such as cakes and ice cream, and men are more likely to turn to soups, pasta and steaks.

The study concluded that, for many women, while spending time with a litre of cookies ‘n’ cream provided temporary relief, it also caused loneliness, sadness and guilt. Yet men regarded their indulgences as rewards for hard work. Researchers found this significant because those who associated comfort foods with positive emotions were more likely to pick healthier fare. Since food selection is so closely linked to past memories, it has been suggested men prefer meal-related foods because soup, steak, and pasta evoke feelings of nurturing and attention. But for women, a rib-eye steak brings to mind a decidedly uncomforting image: dirty stovetops and counters piled with dishes. It’s easier to grab a spoon, a litre of ice cream and hide the evidence afterward.

Edmonton-based caterer Eric Mason is true to type. The Jamaican-born father of two’s comfort food is a meat-and-veg combination. It’s not an obscure dish. In fact, it’s Jamaica’s national dish: ackee and salt fish. Mason, who learned to cook it at the age of 12 from his grandmother, says he keeps coming back to it.

“It’s just something I grew up with, and I like it,” Mason says. “If you were a kid doing your own cooking, it was easy. Ackee was free; you could pick it from the trees. All you needed was the fish.”

Native to West Africa, the ackee is related to the lychee fruit. It is pear-shaped and turns yellow-orange when it is ripe. Split it open and you’ll see three large, shiny, black seeds surrounded by soft, yellowish flesh. Only the fleshy stuff around the seeds is edible; the remainder is poisonous. The fruit must be carefully picked after it has opened naturally and it must be fresh and not overripe. Immature and overripe ackee fruit are also poisonous. In Alberta, the edible fruit is found more safely in cans. In order to make the dish, salted fish (usually cod) is sauted with boiled ackee, together with onions, peppers, tomatoes, and herbs. Mason also prepares dumplings to go with it. It’s a heavy meal, especially if you add dumplings, rice and yams.

“When I was growing up, food was never lying around,” Mason says. “What you could find lying around was fruit. It was interesting to watch my grandmother cook, just to see how it is done. Now I can make it for myself.”

Jamaican cuisine comprises the techniques, flavours, spices and influences of many waves of immigration to the island, including African, British, Chinese, East Indian, Irish and Spanish. Common dishes on a Jamaican menu include curried goat, fried dumplings, meat patties, fried plantain, jerk chicken and steamed cabbage. But in his business, Genius Team Quality Catering, Mason is never asked to make salt fish and ackee. “It’s too common. It would be like catering bacon and eggs to a Canadian wedding,” he explains.

The term ‘comfort food’ usually refers to a home-cooked dish that is familiar, fast and simple. It may be a staple you demanded from the cook of the house over and over again when you were a kid, or it may have been a holiday favourite made by an especially adored relative. Many comfort foods, such as Quebec’s tourtiere, seafood chowder in the Maritimes or the inimitable Alberta bison burger, instantly evoke the flavours and fare of a certain time and place.

Corporate lawyer and foodie Lynette Stanley-Maddocks can’t eat meatloaf without thinking of one of her childhood chores: cooking supper on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Sunday nights, she would get out a cookbook and decide what to make. “I was good at sticking to the recipe. That’s probably the only thing that saved me from disaster.”

Stanley-Maddocks writes about food every week on her blog, lexculinaria.com. She explores every type of cuisine she can, prepares the most exotic dishes with care, photographs them, consumes them and writes about them. Gastronomically speaking, she’s fearless.

But her comfort food is none other than plain old macaroni and cheese. “I donÕt know why,” she says. “I really loved Kraft Dinner as a kid. Now that I’ve grown up, it doesn’t quite do it. It’s too orange and fake. I buy nice fresh pasta, cheddar and Gouda and I probably make it every few weeks. I have a thing for cheese. It’s the one food I would never give up.”

The common threads connecting these Alberta cooks’ stories are childhood memories, smells, a feeling of safety and a loved one close by. When the world feels cold and unforgiving, there is nothing like a comfort food to set it right again.