Comfort food still on front burner

Growing up, Marian Burros so enjoyed the spaghetti and meat sauce her mother cooked every Wednesday night, she'd wake up the next morning and eat the cold leftovers for breakfast.

Decades later, few dishes can bring Ms. Burros as much comfort as that spaghetti sauce. "No matter what I put in the ragu, it always reminds me of Wednesday nights," Burros writes in her latest cookbook.

Sure, tomato and meat sauce sounds comforting. So does meatloaf or macaroni and cheese. How about tostados, cold sesame noodles, or polenta?

In "Cooking for Comfort" (Simon & Schuster, 210 pp., $24), Burros, a food writer for The New York Times, draws upon recipes from the kitchens of friends and relatives, proving that the definition of comfort food lies in the stomach of the ingester.

"Comfort foods are anything that makes us feel safe, warm, and protected," Burros said over breakfast in Boston. "They relieve stress. They make us relax."

Burros says most people's notion of comfort food developed in their childhood home. So it makes perfect sense that she draws comfort from the weekly tomato sauce her Jewish mother learned to cook by watching Italian immigrants stir it over a charcoal flame at a neighborhood park.

Of course, there was the more traditional fare of Russian Jews - roast chicken, brisket, and matzo balls. And when she established her own kitchen, Burros wanted to branch out and master the complexities of French cuisine.

In recent years, she has moved toward simplicity. Many American cooks - herself included - have grown more confident about their abilities and more appreciative of fresh ingredients than fancy preparation. And American eaters, she says, became fed up with dinners so complicated that ordering the main course had become an intellectual exercise.

Then came Sept. 11, and a new longing for the familiar, Burros says. A month after the terrorist attacks, she quoted a friend who watched with satisfaction as "rail-thin women scarfed down potpies" while watching a football game.

Much to her surprise, the article spawned a flood of reader response as well as a cookbook contract. But she worried that the trend might fizzle out by the time her book was published. She hadn't banked on the US going to war just as it hit stores - an event that kept comfort food on the front burner.

Though they are living farther apart now, Burros's family still seeks comfort in one another's food. Her son, Michael, who cooked his first crepes and apricot sauce at age 10, owns a vegetarian restaurant in Spain. And in the book's last chapter, well past Burros's tomato sauce or the chilled beet and cucumber soup, is the rich chocolate brownie with orange rind that Michael bakes both in Spain and with his niece in the US.

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