Comfort Food?

There are days when you simply don’t feel like writing. Or cooking. Or much of anything. This is one of those days, waking up to the news of the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Who feels like food or preparing food or writing about food at a moment like this? The question itself, initially a rhetorical one, got me thinking.

The connections between food and mourning are profound. I remember returning home to Savannah from college during the end of my sophomore year. I was 19, to attend the funeral of my paternal grandmother Annie Levy Melaver. We were very close. I remember coming home after the funeral to her house for the traditional post-service meal. I remember everyone insisting against my wishes that I sit in her place at one end of the table, the end closest to the kitchen. I remember the large white bowl of peeled boiled eggs piled high in front of me. “Eat one,” they said, “it’s traditional.” It was dry, tasteless, almost impossible to swallow. Who could eat at a time like this, especially boiled fucking eggs. I don’t remember the experience to be especially comforting, to put it mildly.

Wikipedia defines comfort food as a “ food that provides a nostalgic or sentimental value to someone,and may be characterized by its high caloric nature, high carbohydrate level, or simple preparation.The nostalgia may be specific to an individual, or it may apply to a specific culture.” I want to call bull shit on this definition, but I’m not even sure where to start. It most certainly doesn’t begin to describe the wide array of dishes that come out of our soul food kitchen. But no matter.

I simply wish to propose a toast to RBG: Perhaps it’s toast in the form of an open-faced slice of sourddough bread topped with fresh avocado, sunnyside up egg, and sea salt: Perhaps it is the famous toast cups of Edna Lewish and Scott Peacock, willed with their special chicken salad; Perhaps it is your libation of choice. To RBG.May her legacy be a blessing to us all. I can drink to that.