Back in the summer of 2011 when Hurricane Irene was barreling up the East Coast from the Carolinas to Maine, the United States Coast Guard posted a document online titled “72 Hour Suggested Hurricane Supply List.” At its core were sensible foods packed with nutrition that needed neither cooking nor refrigeration. But after the dried fruits, cans of fish, and granola bars there was a category called “comfort/stress foods.” Some examples in this section were cookies and sweetened cereals.
Although those two foods are hardly what pop into my head, what struck me was the recognition—even by a buttoned-down government entity—that food is far more than the fuel to power our bodies with vitamins and minerals. It nourishes our emotions, too.
And one of the most comforting foods, for physiological and psychological reasons, is mac and cheese. It shows up on every poll of comfort foods, and was selected twice in a row by The Food Network as the “Comfort Food of the Year.” If you look at the categories of foods in magazines’ year-end “Best of” issues, you’ll often spot mac and cheese on the list.
Comfort foods protect us from a threatening world. Their appeal is based on nostalgia, and the time of our childhood when life was far simpler than it is today. My memories of mac and cheese are of a homemade dish. It never came from a box, although the Kraft blue box had been on supermarket shelves for a decade by the time I was born. But the mac and cheese wasn’t made with the imported Cheddar and Gruyère that fill my refrigerator today, either. It was made with Velveeta. Back then Velveeta, albeit a color and texture that never existed in nature, was the “gold standard” for mac and cheese, and for grilled cheese sandwiches—another great comfort food.
“Real” cheeses like Swiss and Muenster were reserved for sandwiches on crusty rye bread from the bakery, not Pepperidge Farm white. Velveeta was also comforting because it was known, and because it made mac and cheese soft.
Our sense of taste actually comes to the party late in our reactions to eating and food. First we eat with our eyes, and then the sense of smell enters into the equation. Our muscles prefer foods that don’t make them work very hard, which is why soft foods like mac and cheese, meatloaf, and mashed potatoes get high marks.
The brain kicks into the reaction shortly thereafter. Sugar and starch produce serotonin, a neurotransmitter that increases the sense of happiness. Replicating its effect is what makes antidepressants like Prozac work. Salty foods like potato chips make the brain release oxytocin, a hormone also triggered by sexual satisfaction.
While these are physiological responses to food, the brain also generates our concomitant emotional responses. Certain foods, especially those eaten in childhood, have specific memories associated with them. There was the chocolate pudding that you had on Sunday afternoons at your grandmother’s house, the snow cones at the county fair in the summer, and cookies with lots of frosting at Christmas. These connections also explain why foods we logically know to be inferior in nutritional value, like Hostess Twinkies, remain on the market decades after real bakeries have popped up all over the country. And why everyone has a personal definition of what side dishes are appropriate for Thanksgiving dinner.
While our attitudes to categories of food are hardwired into our brains, our attitudes about specific ingredients do change with time and with experience eating a panoply of different foods. While I will always love mac and cheese, no longer can it be made with Velveeta. My palate is too far advanced now.
That’s where the recipes in this book enter your life and kitchen. You’ll be able, when cooking the dishes in this book, to relive the warm memories of the mac and cheese of your youth, but satisfy the tastes you like today, too.
Happy Cooking!
Ellen Brown
Providence, Rhode Island