Yotam Ottolenghi has witnessed a shift in how we eat in recent years. Now, he says our main motivation for getting into the kitchen is to “find some solace and comfort”.
The Israeli-British chef knows a thing or two about how people eat – he’s been at the forefront of home cooking trends since founding his first delicatessen in London in the early Noughties, which soon expanded to more restaurants, newspaper columns, TV shows and, now, his 11th cookbook.
“The general motivation to cook has shifted quite a bit… These days, people go to the kitchen [not] to push their culinary skills, they go there to find some solace and comfort,” Ottolenghi notes.
“I think it has a lot to do with the state of the world at this particular time – Covid, financial crises, wars, and just a general feeling in the world that things feel very unsettled. I saw it a lot in Covid, but I still see it now – people really want to find a sense of anchoring, and they really do find it in cooking and food.”
But what does comfort food actually mean? It’s a broad category of dishes – one that’s difficult to pin down.
“It’s not about particular recipes – it’s not about a mash or a mac and cheese, it’s much more about what gives us comfort,” Ottolenghi, 55, explains.
“The answer is very specific to us as humans, but it’s also a universal truth that people do find solace in cooking and in feeding themselves and others, through things they’ve known in the past – a sense of nostalgia.”
Comfort is the core theme – and the name – of Ottolenghi’s latest cookbook, co-written with Helen Goh, Verena Lochmuller and Tara Wigley. When coming up with recipes, Ottolenghi said the group thought about “things that have that emotional anchor – those are often childhood memories, but it’s not strictly childhood.
“Things become comfort food also later in life and as a grown up. I travelled with Helen in Malaysia quite extensively maybe 12 or 15 years ago, and I really learned to enjoy Malaysian food. Now, many of the Malaysian dishes that Helen introduced me to are my comfort dishes, because they’re just so good and they bring back that trip – nasi lemak and nasi goreng, and all the wonderful soups, laksas etc.”
Memories and experiences are so personal, it’s hard to cleanly categorise comfort food.
“The funny thing is that a lamb stew and vanilla ice cream are two comfort dishes – they are different temperatures, they’re different textures, they’re eaten at different times of the day in different parts of the world. So it’s quite difficult to say there is a bunch of common denominators that make it [comforting].”
But there are a few loose tenets – “sugar is a very common thing – sugar in savoury food helps”, notes Ottolenghi, who lives in north London with his husband and two children. “Maybe a little bit of starch – and when I talk about noodles and pasta, something that’s slightly slippery on the tongue, or has an interesting interaction with your mouth as you eat and it gives you that sense of satisfaction. But it would be very difficult to put a list of requirements on a dish to be a comfort dish – it’s really about emotions.”
The four contributors bring their own diverse backgrounds to the book – Ottolenghi takes inspiration from Italy and Germany (through his parents), Jerusalem and Amsterdam (where he grew up and lived) and London; Goh draws upon China, Malaysia and Australia; Lochmuller’s influences include Germany, Scotland and New York; while London-based Wigley is a connoisseur of Levantine food. That’s a lot of different voices and inspirations to wrangle, and Ottolenghi says putting it all together into one cookbook was both “challenging and easy”.
“It was challenging in the sense that we didn’t see how it all came together, until it did come together. It seemed quite random and eclectic – what does [Lochmuller’s] potato salad have to do with Helen’s ramen noodles? Well, the nice answer is that we all could really easily ride around the idea of those things that give us comfort.”
With so many global influences, Ottolenghi and co were keen to pay proper homage to where dishes came from.
He says that “rightly so” people are “quite sensitive to the question of ownership in food”, but he argues: “I don’t think anyone can actually own a dish. The world is a very rich mixture of influences and food has always evolved through assimilation between cultures and people travelling and adopting this, that and the other.
“But there is a tendency to slightly whitewash the differences, or not tell the whole story. For me, anyone can cook anything, and anyone can write a recipe about any culture. But the only thing that is really important, and we really made a point out of it – I’ve been doing it for many years – is really try to track down the process which led you to that recipe. What is it? What is my connection to it?”
For Ottolenghi, it was key to be “very considerate to tell the story [of a dish] and give it the right name – I think this is where you are less likely to take a wrong step”.
And from a personal point of view, he says his own interpretation of comfort food is only getting broader.
“It expands – as you get older, you have a richer set of influences and experiences, and you’re exposed to more things. I’m not only talking about ingredients and cuisines… But also it’s about, for example, I have kids [Max, 11, and Flynn, nine],” he says.
“I’ve seen them growing up, so I have a really clear sense of what gives a kid comfort or joy when they eat. We’ve all had it, because we’ve all been kids, but once you’re grown up, you tend to forget. So you get a second chance when you look at [them] – and if you don’t have to have kids, you can look at other kids around you.
“What is it about the joy of food that they have? I make breakfast for the kids every single morning, and I get an immediate reaction as to how good it was, so I really know what works for them. If I make eggs, it can’t be too runny – because then they feel like it’s raw – but it can’t be too cooked, because then it’s obviously dry, not delicious enough.
“So you really get a good idea of what comfort is for a child’s palette – and I think that applies to adults as well.”
Ottolenghi COMFORT by Yotam Ottolenghi, Helen Goh, Verena Lochmuller and Tara Wigley is published by Ebury Press, priced £30. Photography by Jonathan Lovekin. Available now.
