Colin Goh and Woo Yen Yen

The following piece was published in the Sunday Times on 11 February 2007. Thanks to all my friends who contributed their comfort foods. The title is a play on Ruth Reichl’s “Comfort Me With Apples”. Apples? Gimme a burger anytime!

Sunday Times 11 February 2007
Comfort Me with Burgers
by Colin Goh

Next Sunday will mark the 9th year in a row that the Wife and I have gone without a Chinese New Year.

Yes, yes, we know that New York has a huge Chinese population, but as I’ve mentioned in previous columns (2004, 2006), their celebrations just aren’t the same. Good Baba boy that I am, it just isn’t Chinese New Year if there aren’t my mother’s homemade pineapple tarts (Mum, if you’re reading this: hint, hint, still got time to Fedex), and I’m sorry if this offends some mainland Chinese folks out there, but those spicy ginseng sweets of yours cannot possibly be festive when they taste like kachuak (cockroaches) with chili.

“Come,” said the Wife a few days ago. “Let’s console ourselves with some comfort food.”

“On!” I jumped up. “Let’s go to the Corner Bistro for a burger!”

The Wife immediately shot me a look that could have turned milk into yogurt instantly. “A burger is NOT comfort food,” she said icily.

I paused. While yes, the cockles of my heart are often warmed by a really good medium-rare flame-grilled burger served atop a toasted brioche bun alongside hot, salty fries – I had to agree that there was just something wrong about citing it. But I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

“Why not?” I eventually replied, holding up my arms to shield my face, in case she, you know, threw something. “It comforts me, what.”

“No,” she flared her nostrils. “Comfort food is not just what gives you momentary pleasure or stress relief. That’s…” Whereupon she employed a scientific term that rhymes with ‘perturbation’.

“No wonder I feel guilty after each time I have a burger,” I said, slumping back into my chair. “So what is comfort food?”

“It’s not about the taste per se,” she explained. “Many foods can taste great. But comfort foods trigger specific associations, usually with a place or time that was secure or pleasant for the eater. Like the madeleine did for Proust. You could eat a really nice madeleine too, but you wouldn’t have the same reaction as Proust.”

Here are a couple of relevant quotes from Proust’s “À la recherche du temps perdu” which confirm Yen’s restrictive definition of comfort food:

“She (Proust’s mother) sent for one of those squat plump little cakes called “petites madeleines,” which look as though they had been molded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell … I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure invaded my senses …

And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray … when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane …. and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and garden alike, from my cup of tea.”

“For things … as soon as we have perceived them are transformed within us into something immaterial, something of the same nature as all our preoccupations and sensations of that particular time, with which, indissolubly, they blend. A name read long ago in a book contains within its syllables the strong wind and brilliant sunshine that prevailed while we were reading it. And this is why the kind of literature which contents itself with ‘describing things,’ with giving of them merely a miserable abstract of lines and surfaces, is in fact, though it calls itself realist, the furthest removed from reality and has more than any other the effect of saddening and impoverishing us, since it abruptly severs all communication of our present self both with the past, the essence of which is preserved in things, and with the future, in which things incite us to enjoy the essence of the past a second time. Yet it is precisely this essence that an art worthy of the name must seek to express; then at least, if it fails, there is a lesson to be drawn from its impotence (whereas from the successes of realism there is nothing to be learnt), the lesson that this essence is, in part, subjective and incommunicable.”

“Yah lah, yah lah,” I muttered, adding, “Chao lit hons student.”

But the Wife was right. My usual association with madeleines is pumping petrol, because the only time I ever pick them up is from the Delifrance Express while waiting to pay at my regular Esso station. Not quite Sunday mornings at Combray.

I began to think about it more. So what would my madeleine be? I would have to say probably my Mum’s tau yew bak – belly pork, taukwa and hard-boiled eggs, stewed in garlicky dark soy sauce. A pot of that is like a time machine for me.

For the Wife, it is a can of Ma Ling brand pork luncheon meat, fried and served with ber (watery rice gruel), which conjures for her memories of Saturday mornings in her grandmother’s Queenstown flat, with Rediffusion playing in the background.

“Piang,” I told the Wife. “With both of our comfort foods stemming from pork, it really will be the Year of the Pig.”

I also emailed friends for their comfort foods. Quite rightly, there was no consensus. It really was very personal: pork porridge with marmite; fish head curry; kway chap; mee siam; char siew fan; prata, but only in the mornings; prata, but only after midnight; “sup kum” seafood hor fun; fried egg sandwiches; chicken rice; rendang…

According to Wikipedia, that democratic if not always reliable resource, “a substantial majority of comfort foods are (sic) composed largely of simple or complex carbohydrates, such as sugar, rice, refined wheat, and so on. It has been postulated that such foods induce an opiate-like effect in the brain, which may account for their soothing nature.” This is clearly a Euro- or American-centric view. Many of my Asian friends cite dishes where meat or proteins are the dominant source of comfort. The Wife has come up with something more all-encompassing – comfort foods are primarily those that are fattening. “You might as well call them ‘come, fat’ food,” she said.

One small detail bugged me though: when the Wife broached comfort food, why did I instinctively think of burgers instead of tau yew bak? Had I, after so many years in the US, finally become (shock! horror!) angmorified?

I considered this, and dismissed it. You see, a burger is something I can buy, whereas here, tau yew bak is something I have no choice but to cook.

How comforting can it really be when you have to expend labour?

Postscript: Actually my love for burgers, which never began till I moved to New York (probably because I never ate a really solid burger before that), is getting more and more ridiculous. I’m even starting to read burger-related blogs, such as the excellent A Hamburger Today, whose title comes from the Popeye comic strip, where Wimpy’s constant mooching refrain is “I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.” (One day I’ll write more about Popeye, and how EC Segar’s work both inspired me and gave me nightmares…)

Anyway, my favourite burger in New York is the one at Corner Bistro. I’ve gone to some so-called “gourmet” burger joints, but for some reason, few come close to the simple, almost elemental burger here at the Corner Bistrot. The ones at Laurent Tourondel’s BLT Burger are worthy challengers, though - and their better seating conditions sometimes tip the balance for me. I haven’t tried what is supposed to be the best burger in NYC yet - the one at the legendary Peter Luger steakhouse, where perhaps not coincidentally, they also serve the best steak in the world. Every time I’m there, I cave and order the porterhouse, which can taste more beautiful than the finest bluefin tuna sashimi.

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