Mom, the meatloaf?

On who defines what a "classic" comfort food is

Over the past couple months, I’ve been reading two older cookbooks — one published in the late 80s, the other in the early 2010s — that were both very popular when they first came out. Reading older cookbooks is sort of a trip because it reminds me of how much cooking and conversations around food have totally changed — even ones published a decade ago.

The authors of these books tell you that the foundational building blocks of cooking can be learned from Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, Jacques Pepin, perhaps Mark Bittman or Ruth Reichl. They worship French and Italian dishes and techniques and they dabble in more than a little bit of 1990s diet culture. Most notably, of all the recipes in these two popular books, I didn’t feel inspired to cook any of them.

Both books were both heavy on “classic” American dishes like meatloaf, beef stew, pot roast, and chicken pot pie — dishes I’ve never had. I did not grow up eating them, nor have I ever cooked them myself as an adult. But all of these dishes hold an important, revered place in American food culture.

These foods are often evoked as nostalgia-laden comfort foods. Old-fashioned beef stew is one of the most popular recipes of all time on New York Times Cooking. Cookbooks and food blogs constantly refer to “Mom’s meatloaf.” In 2017, food writers Frank Bruni and Jennifer Steinhauer published the cookbook A Meatloaf in Every Oven, in which collected 50 different recipes for the “iconic” dish, some from celebrity chefs. In an excerpt of the book published in Bon Appetit, Bruni and Steinhauer note that while the dish has roots in medieval Europe, it really became an American staple in the 1940s and 1950s as ground meat became more common. Meatloaf became a dish that helped families save money by extending the life of various meats.

Today, when meatloaf is described as a classic comfort food, who exactly is it comforting for? What about those for whom nostalgic comfort food is Mom’s pho, or Mom’s dosa and green chutney, or Mom’s jollof rice?

I’m so glad that today’s food media landscape and cookbook offerings look very different. Cookbooks now feel so much more refreshing — like Eric Kim’s Korean American: Food That Tastes Like Home, Priya Krishna’s Indian-ish, Hetty McKinnon’s To Asia With Love, Hawa Hassan’s In Bibi’s Kitchen, Kwame Onwuachi’s My America, and so many others.

Finally, we have a new class of diverse American cookbook authors who showcase the foods they grew up eating. Every child of immigrants has stories about getting teased for being different because they were the only kid at school whose mom packed something for lunch that’s their cultural equivalent of PB&J. Today, there’s a generation of Americans publishing their own cookbooks based on the recipes they grew up learning from their families.

Onwuachi’s book, in particular, takes aim at the singular, and often exclusionary, vision of American comfort food. In a recent piece in Food & Wine, he writes:

Show me an America made of apple pie and hot dogs, baseball and Chevrolet, and I won't recognize it.

My America is a country of countless flavors and endless adaptation. The Bronx, where I grew up, contains multitudes: the Jamaicans of Gun Hill Road, where my father, himself half Jamaican and half Nigerian, lives; the West Indians from Wakefield; the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans of the south side, where I lived with my mother and sister; and countless more…. Jamaican corner bakeries sell hardo bread and jerk chicken. Closet-sized Trinidadian roti shops are fragrant with curries and paratha. In our own home, what my mom cooked was part of another sort of story, the food of the American South and its Black sons and daughters. Crawfish étouffée, jambalaya, and potatoes tinged with russet-red house spice told of her own family's lineage, embroidered into the southern coast of Louisiana and Texas, then north with the Great Migration. As a not-yet chef, I consumed all of these cultures with gusto. My world opened up at the table. Food was, and continues to be, how I make sense of the world.

Onwuachi writes of how, when he entered the Culinary Institute of America, he had “mentally cordoned off the food I loved from the food I wanted to make professionally.” Culinary schools, and to some degree, the food industry at large, revere French cooking; it is treated as universally superior to almost anything else. Onwuachi continues:

My fellow students and I were put through the paces of French tradition. The techniques, the sauces, the ingredients, the language, the white hats, the clean toque, the "oui, chef"—all this formed a pyramid with France at the top. Like anyone learning a foreign language, I found the process exciting. And I learned how to form words, then sentences, and eventually stories with these techniques. But whose stories was I trying to tell?

Thankfully, recipes now are a lot more globally influenced. It’s much more common to come across recipes with gochujang or turmeric or miso, ingredients no longer considered as “exotic” by western audiences as they once were. This can present its own complications — it’s never great when a white cookbook author presents global ingredients in a whitewashed way to their audiences, without giving credit to the cultures they came from — but in general, American palates have expanded, and that’s a welcome change.

We’re no longer in a time and place where food media considers meatloaf to be the pinnacle of American comfort food, or where food writers proclaim that “everyone” “needs” to know how to make a classic pot roast. There is no longer one concept of what defines “American” food, and that experience is no longer treated as universal. It’s probably time for me to donate those old cookbooks, anyway — my new ones are much better.

Good things to read

How did recipe developer become a famous job? Gawker.

A few math problems for mothers, The New Yorker.

What happens to Christian influencers when they get married? Buzzfeed News.

The return of the hot table, Eater.

How a 24-year-old waitress eats on $18K a year in Durham, NC, Bon Appetit. I love this new series.

The World’s 50 Best Restaurants List is food media’s rich out-of-touch uncle, Bon Appetit.

Teen Vogue’s “Nepo Babies,” Dirt.

Some surprising good news: bookstores are booming and becoming more diverse, New York Times.

America’s childcare equilibrium has shattered, The Atlantic.

The magic of your first work friends, New York Times.

Millennials are hitting 40. What is that going to look like? Harper’s Bazaar. (Their whole 40 is the new 40 package is pretty good, too.)

Text your friends. It matters more than you think, New York Times.

Good things to cook

Some things I’ve cooked the past two weeks: Bulgogi tofu. Crispy chicken tinga tacos. Chicken-zucchini meatballs. Korean ground beef stir fry. Cilantro lime chicken and lentil bowls. Sheet pan shrimp fajitas.