Comfort Food

It’s November. According to the Met Office we have actually lost about two hours of daylight during October! Which perhaps explains why we often feel in need of comfort at this time of year, even though January and February are usually so much colder and bleaker. And looking at the state of the world, I think we all feel the need of it anyway. Can we find some comfort in our food?

Different comfort foods for different people

In Food, Culture and Identity I mentioned the recipe for pasta with simple tomato sauce that Zeno might have given to Clyde when he was shocked and tipsy (Ghost Train, p.82 for paperback readers). That’s a good example of what I would call comfort food: something fairly simple and mildly savoury that lines your stomach and nourishes you; something that puts no strain on your digestion or tastebuds and that you can almost always get down however you’re feeling; something that leaves you feeling satisfied and somehow reassured. Comforted, in fact.

I also gave an example of a culture whose identity had been shaped by a food myth. I expect our ideas of what makes comfort food varies according to our culture and identity. For example, people from South Asia might well be soothed by something with plenty of chilli, but much as I like it, I would never choose it as comfort food.

Similarly, chicken soup inspired by a traditional Jewish recipe is widely recognised as comfort food, but this particular recipe would never be my choice. I doubt whether I could feel comforted by eating something that I knew had used up a large proportion of the weekly shopping budget on its own! Good chickens are expensive, so for me chicken soup will always be something that happens to bones and leftovers. I’m including a recipe for my own comforting, silky, savoury cream of chicken soup. It’s very economical too.

Ultra-processed junk

Unfortunately, many of us now turn for satisfaction to ultra-processed foods which are formulated to give us combinations of refined fats and sugars that are highly addictive. I’m not blaming consumers for this, as there are a plethora of reasons mostly beyond their control which cause them to do this. These products are not food and shouldn’t be on shop shelves packaged and labelled as such any more than methylated spirits or cardboard.

Satisfying cravings and feeding a voracious addiction, which is what many of these products create when regularly consumed, is not the same as comfort. Implicit in comfort are elements of nurturing and wellbeing. Ultra-processed foods do not bring health or even nourishment. They make you unwell and dissatisfied in order to make vast profits for huge corporations.

Obviously, I’m not here to provide dietary or health advice. But I can bring hope. I suffered from food addictions and digestive issues quite seriously earlier in my life, but I am completely recovered. It’s not a matter of resisting temptation for me. My body no longer recognises ultra-processed junk as food, and I would no more put it my mouth than I would methylated spirits or cardboard. So if you’ve been sucked in by this stuff and feel it’s ruined your health, take heart. You can get over it and still love and enjoy real food.

My Comfort Foods

The pasta with simple tomato sauce topped with some grated cheddar cheese would certainly be one of my comfort foods. There is something comforting about tinned tomatoes and cheddar cheese seems to feature in most of my choices. In addition, this is a dish that fellow Castle Sefton Press author, my partner John Blake, cooks very well. He’s not much of a cook, so this pasta has the added benefit of being an enjoyable hot meal that I haven’t had to cook myself. We always have the ingredients in the house, and it costs very little, all of which adds to its relaxing qualities.

Salad

Cookery writer Madhur Jaffrey often gives her recipe for ‘Salaad’ that appeared on their table at home for every meal. It always contained tomatoes, cucumber and onion and they ‘ate it with everything.’ (Curry Easy, p. 231). We didn’t eat our standard salad with everything, although I’ve always loved it and probably would have if given the chance. But it did have standard ingredients, the most essential being lettuce.

Lettuce as a comfort food

“What?” I can hear you saying. Well, it’s true. I love lettuce. It’s soft and crunchy, sweet and bitter, very refreshing and a natural receptacle for a dressing. It’s very good for us but does contain a drug with mild sedative, analgesic and euphoric properties. Perhaps I am a food addict after all! It was these properties of lettuce that Beatrix Potter was thinking of when Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny fall asleep after gorging on Mr McGregor’s bolted lettuces in The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

The recipe

So, to make what passes as ‘salad’ in my head, you need a large bowl, some lettuce, salt, pepper, vinegar and some salad servers or tongues. Wash and dry your lettuce, break or tear it into bite-sized pieces and put it into the bowl. Now you add whatever suitable vegetables you have in the fridge, cut into bite sized pieces, aiming for a variety of colour and no more than say seven varieties in total.

One of them needs to be some kind of onion – red, white, shallot and spring onion are all good. Cucumber is always in there for me, but after that the other vegetables could be tomatoes, peppers of any colour, radishes, grated carrot, cooked beetroot, celery, fennel, apple, kiwi fruit or kohlrabi. You could add some sprouted seeds, mange-tout, french beans or even tinned sweetcorn but it’s starting to become something less recognisable at that point.

The dressing

The standard here is 3 parts extra virgin olive oil to 1 part cider vinegar with a good pinch of English mustard whisked together. I prefer to season the salad with salt and pepper rather than add it to the dressing. Sometimes I might add extra vinegar or a little sugar. My mother used to serve this salad with hot roast chicken and curried rice with sultanas and flaked almonds. It’s a delicious combination that favours the extra vinegar and sugar dressing.

If you are eating the salad with plain meat or fish – it’s particularly good with grilled trout or steak, if you can afford such things – you can replace the oil dressing with a little mayonnaise thinned with a drop of vinegar.

Staple Accompaniments

If I had to choose between bread and potatoes, it would be potatoes every time. To turn this salad into my ultimate comfort food, it needs to be served with potatoes of some kind. Chips are good, as are jacket potatoes, but for maximum satisfaction and comfort I require either boiled new potatoes or mash, depending on the season, with butter and grated cheddar cheese. The sweet solidity of the potatoes, the richness of the butter and savouriness of the cheese mixed with the diverse crunches of the salad and the sharpness of the vinegar make this something I could eat day after day. I sometimes have!

Comfort food in action

We both had COVID right at the beginning of the pandemic when England had just gone into lockdown. I was not in great health at the time, and other circumstances made it a particularly stressful situation. I lost my appetite completely for the first few days. The first sign of recovery was when I started to eat again, and the first thing I had was ‘salad’ with potatoes and a tiny piece of steak. I went on to eat that every day until I was better, and it really felt as if it was feeding me back to health.

Divine Cream of Chicken Soup

There is a fashion now for calling things the ‘ultimate’ version, and this is perhaps what I am intending for cream of chicken soup here. But ultimate sounds much too active and aggressive for this most elegant and gentle of comfort foods.

I once saw an Escoffier recipe for duck soup which I can no longer find. (If you have a resource for this, or know that I have misremembered, please let me know in the comments). Escoffier boiled whole ducks for days and then creamed and sieved them, bones and all. Now I am not going to those lengths, but that kind of condensed, concentrated flavour is what I’m looking for. You might call it ‘essence of roast chicken’. I think of it as the real flavour that roast chicken flavour crisps are trying to mimic by artificial means.

Mysteriously Unfashionable

Three recipes in one

So you have eaten all your roast chicken and are left with the bones with some bits clinging to them and perhaps the giblets, some bits of skin or some leftover roasting pan juices. That’s all the chicken you need for this. And you don’t just get soup. You can pour this soup into small cups or moulds, chill it and turn it out as terrines to eat with toast and salad. Or you can spread the cold soup, which will have a smooth, lightly jellied texture, on sandwiches as chicken paste.

It’s also extremely good for you, being essentially bone stock. So it’s delicious, versatile, cheap and healthy! On the other hand, it is a bit of a fiddle to make. But you can spread the process over two days, or even freeze the stock and meat before blending and reducing to complete the recipe when you have time. You can also freeze the cooked chicken carcass if you haven’t time to do any of it when you have the leftovers to hand.

The Recipe

I have used a pressure cooker for the stock. As well as saving time and fuel, pressure cookers make the best stock, stews, dal and dried beans. They are also excellent for stewed fruit, cooked beetroot, risotto, pot roasts and many other dishes. I encourage you to invest in one. If you cook, you won’t regret it. But I have included instructions for making the soup in an ordinary pan for those who don’t have one.

Don’t be tempted to skip the sieving. You will never get the smooth texture without it and you might end up with shards of bone in your soup. As long as you use a metal sieve it’s a lot easier than you might think. And don’t leave out the mace. It’s the one essential flavouring here that is going to bring out the chickeniness.

Eat your soup safely. It is quite safe to reheat it providing that it has been stored in the fridge and thoroughly heated through but I wouldn’t reheat it more than once. And always cover the surface of any waiting or stored soup with a piece of baking parchment to stop a skin forming.

Divine Cream of Chicken Soup

The smoothest and silkiest of roast chicken soups

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Servings: 4

Ingredients Equipment Method

Ingredients

  

• 1 roast chicken carcass
• 1 small onion, peeled and halved
• 1 carrot, peeled or scrubbed and halved
• 1 stick of celery, halved
• 1 blade of mace
• 1 bay leaf
• 3 oz butter , or the chicken fat made up to 3oz with butter
• 3 oz plain flour
• 3 1/2 fl oz double cream or 6 tablespoons
• salt
• black pepper
• water

Equipment

• 1 Pressure Cooker or a large saucepan
• 1 Wire sieve , not a nylon mesh sieve
• 1 Large jug
• 2 plates or wide bowls
• 1 medium saucepan
• 1 stick blender or liquidiser
• 1 wooden spoon
• 2 metal spoons
• 1 Flat whisk
• scales
• baking parchment

Method

 

1. Put the chicken carcass with any loose bones and giblets into the pressure cooker or large pan. Add the vegetables, bay leaf and mace. Press everything down firmly with your hand.
   1 roast chicken carcass, 1 small onion, peeled and halved, 1 carrot, peeled or scrubbed and halved, 1 stick of celery, halved, 1 blade of mace, 1 bay leaf
   
2. Add cold water until the carcass is just covered. Put the lid on the pressure cooker, bring to high pressure and cook for one hour. If using the pan, cover and bring to the boil then simmer on as low a heat as possible for two-and-a-half hours.
   water
3. Let the pressure drop naturally, and then open the cooker and strain the contents into the sieve over the jug. Tip the solid contents into one of the plates or bowls.
4. Cover the liquid and let both liquids and solids cool. The liquid can be refrigerated as soon as it is cool enough. Before the solids get too cold, strip the meat from the remains into the other clean plate or bowl. Make sure you get every last bit! Discard the remains, including the vegetables and spices and refrigerate the meat.
5. Once the liquid is cool enough for the fat to have solidified on top, you can carry on. This will take some hours so you could leave it overnight.
6. Remove the stock and the meat from the fridge. Skim the solidified fat from the top of the stock. You can use this for the roux later, or freeze it to make superb roast potatoes in the future.
7. Put the stock into the medium saucepan. Put the meat into the jug or the liquidiser and add a few tablespoons of the stock so that it will blend. Now put the stock on a high heat and boil it hard to reduce it.
8. Meanwhile, blend the meat to a paste. Remove the paste to a clean bowl or plate. Set up the sieve over the jug and then rub the paste through the sieve with the metal spoon. Don’t forget to scrape the underneath of the sieve with another, clean, metal spoon.
   
9. Once sieved, add the meat paste to the boiling stock and continue to boil and reduce the whole down until you have 2 pints or just under. If you go too far, just top up to 2 pints with water. Add the cream to the stock and leave it all in the jug.
   3 1/2 fl oz double cream
10. Now make your roux for the velouté. Wipe out the saucepan. Melt the butter, or chicken fat and butter, and then using the flat whisk, mix in the flour until smooth and cook the mixture gently for a minute or two.
    3 oz butter, 3 oz plain flour
11. Add the hot stock mixture, ladleful by ladleful, whisking to keep the mixture smooth and keeping the heat low. Once it is all added, switch to the wooden spoon and keep stirring and raise the heat to medium. Soon the soup should develop a silken texture and be just thick enough to coat the back of your spoon.
    
12. Check the seasoning and add salt as needed. Add just a turn of black pepper – you don’t want it to mask the chicken flavour. Now let the soup simmer for a few minutes to cook the flour and then it is ready to eat!
    salt, black pepper
    

Video

https://emilytellwright.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/IMG_7363.mov

Notes

Don’t forget to cover the surface of any uneaten soup with baking parchment to prevent a skin from forming.

Digression into family history

The Staffordshire Oatcake

These days, oatcakes are almost always eaten with cheese. For my father, though, who was born in 1922, they were more of a general staple. He would eat them with bacon, sausage, cheese, eggs, chops, steak or butter and jam in the same way we would bread.

History

The oatcake has an interesting history, and there is an excellent book about it, which also contains recipes to make your own oatcakes if you can’t buy them where you live. JB has been making his own since COVID. The cooking takes a bit of practice, and is much assisted by having a proper iron griddle. You can also read a quick précis of its history in this excellent article by Jenna Goodwin, where you also have the opportunity to download a free book of (rather eccentric!) oatcake recipes.

Jenna mentions that oatcake making in The Potteries (as Stoke-on-Trent used to be called) ‘was often a cottage industry, with elderly widows making dozens of oatcakes daily on an iron bakestone to earn a living’. (Bakestone is pronounced ‘backstun.’) Some of my family were doing just that.

All the Emilys

There seems to have been a tradition in my mother’s family to call the eldest daughter Emily, and here we have my grandmother Emily Mountford with her mother and grandmother. All the Emilys were renowned cooks, with visitors always dropping in on baking day.

I believe it was great, great-grandmother Emily Booth who was making the oatcakes to sell from home, but I’m not entirely sure. Whoever it was, as a girl grandmother Emily Mountford was sent to the brewery to get the yeast for the oatcake making.

Barmy Oatcakes

This is very interesting, although it didn’t occur to me why for a long time! We know where the grandmothers lived, and we know where the brewery was (Parkers in Burslem). There would have been several bakers nearer than the brewery in those days where bakers’ yeast could be bought. And there were some very posh bakeries about the same distance away as Parkers. So why go to the brewery?

You would get your yeast from the brewery if you were baking with the ancient British method of ale-barm. From pre-Roman times, bread in Britain was leavened using the yeasty froth that formed on the wort when ale was brewing. In southern Europe, sourdough was the traditional method. The clue is in the name, and ale-barm bread was sweet rather than sour. Sourdough must have been much more difficult in cool, damp north-western Europe, and ale brewing was commonplace in Britain.

The ale-barm method would particularly lend itself to a batter such as used for oatcakes. So I’m fairly sure that my family were making their Staffordshire oatcakes with ale-barm. Which makes them one of the last surviving uses of this very old technique.

Making oatcakes today

Sadly, I don’t have the family recipe for oatcakes. I don’t even know if it was ever written down. Can we try to recreate the ale-barm flavour? I’ve never had the chance to try, and I would need to do some research and trials too. What I do recommend is Bioreal Yeast which contains strains of natural yeasts and lactic acid bacteria grown on organic grain. You can read a bit more about its advantages in this blog post from Shipton Mill.

I wish I could share some with you. But do look out for Staffordshire oatcakes and try them if you get chance. You’ll always be looking out for them after that! And may your food and this blog bring you some cheer and comfort in the darkest of days.