In praise of being ordinary

Comfort foods are familiar, simple foods that are home-cooked or eaten at informal restaurants. Peasant food, in other words, with some sentimental appeal.

Comfort foods have a lot of power to settle a trouble day, a bit like the orange Madeleine cake in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past

Comfort food is made from common ingredients, down-to-earth, and easy to prepare. Many people eat comfort food because it is generally easily digestible, is in their memory tasty and flavorful, or carries a promise of reward, like mum used to offer.

Often you can’t buy this stuff in restaurants, except some hip places which charge a fortune for being so up market, snooty and trend setting.

Foodstuffs that can nearly always be certain to bring me a feeling of childish security include:

Meat loaf

Mushrooms on toast

Tripe and onions

Lamb sandwich with pickles

Ploughman’s lunch for picnics

Corned beef cooked in a pressure cooker

Fish and chips on a Friday night

Chile con carne, not from a can

Lumpy custard

Christmas pudding with coins in it

Home grown figs, plums and almonds

In later life, when I started a new family, we found security in new comfort foods:

Spaghetti bolognaise

Shepherd’s pie

Any Chinese food

Grilled cheese on toast

Bubble and squeak

Pancakes

Home made biscuits

Birthday cakes

I wonder what my grandkids generation will consider to be comfort food, when they have had a hard day at the nuclear plant. They have had so many meals in McDonalds, so many pizzas, so many restaurant brunches.

Of course they eat well at home, but their houses are full of coffee table cook books from Jamie and Nigella. Their parents are so busy there isn’t time for them to spend a day cooking slowly and filling their houses with wonderful aromas.

One house which I believe would have wonderful memories of magical comfort foods is described in the One Ordinary Day blog, written by Michele. Wonderful food, good photography

http://oneordinaryday.wordpress.com/page/2/

There are about two hours on Christmas day that I really enjoy.

There’s the time early in the morning when kids first wake, trembling with excitement to see if Santa Claus has been to their house. There’s their pure joy when they open a few gifts. This Christmas spirit takes hold of the house for about an hour. Then the day returns to normal.

There’s an hour or so it takes to eat Christmas lunch - or dinner - together. That presupposes it is a simple meal, with a few special treats. Not an excuse for greed, envy, glut and surplus. If you are really lucky, you might get to share a second meal with another family, or friends. Then that hour is an added bonus. But as soon as your meal is over, don’t hang around to wash the dishes as a gang. That’s when the rot starts. Dish washing is never magic at the best of times, and Christmas day can’t change that. Just leave the table, and draw a curtain over the magic till next year. Life is back to normal.

In the Charles Dickens stories of Christmas, People knock off from work an hour early on Christmas day, to go home to have their meal together. Bob Cratchitt returns to work on Boxing day.

Compare his pleasure to expectations today. We expect to be allowed to leave work at lunch time the day before Christmas. What on earth for?

The day after Christmas is expected to be a holiday, to give us a chance to recover from our excess consumption on Christmas day. If Boxing day falls, say on Saturday as it did this year, we expect a replacement holiday two days later on the Monday. Bah, humbug.

In the old Christmas poem The Night before Christmas, we hear “not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.” Today the pre Christmas house is pandemonium, wrapping too many cheap gifts to make them look not-cheap, rushing down to the mall at 11.45 pm to see if shops run by people of non-christian faith might still be open and have some more wrapping paper that we forgot to buy in the six week shopping season before Christmas day.

Christmas decorations and gift catalogues start to appear in Woolworths and Target aisles as early as late August/early September, and the majority of shoppers do not even seem to notice anything out of the ordinary in this.

There are so many office and business Christmas parties that we can’t schedule them all in the month of December. So invitations start to arrive with RSVP for early November.

I can’t even begin to think of the stupid Christmas ‘traditions’ in Australia, without getting a headache, obligatory greeting cards decorated with fake snow and songs about sleigh rides, and mistletoe where Aussie bush flowers should hang, and images of fat people wearing heavy fur coats in the middle of our summer heat.

Excess in December has become an eighth deadly sin, up there for grossness with greed, envy, sloth, pride, gluttony, lust and anger. Summer celebration of Christmas is a constant demand for “more”, “bigger”, “sooner” and “holier than thou”.

Commercial Christmas has become too much.