In the 2022 culinary-thriller The Menu, the climactic scene was knitted with sheer artistic brilliance, and was extremely symbolic. The male protagonist, a rebellious psychopath culinary genius Chef Slowik (played by Ralph Fiennes) and the female protagonist Margot (played by Anya Taylor-Joy) exchange a conversation, which holds the key to the theme of the movie. Exhausted and exasperated, also as a desperate last attempt to save herself and run away from the morbid as well as dystopian Hawthorn restaurant, Margot decides to trick Chef Slowik. She goes on to tell him that the foods prepared by him lack ‘love’, her appetite is hardly satiated by all those ‘showy’ foods, his foods ‘bored’ her and she is literally ‘starving’. She is then asked by the chef what she would like to have, and she opts for a cheeseburger - ‘ a real cheeseburger, not some fancy, deconstructed avant bullshit’, a traditional one - medium with american cheese. Slowik gets her motive, makes her one and she then leaves the island with her takeaway.
This scene is symbolic in the sense that it holds the true essence of the whole film and the message it wishes to deliver vis-a-vis the protagonist, i.e. Chef Slowik. The movie targets the whole high-dining industry - industry in the sense a capitalistic one, which has made the food more of a commodity, a status-symbol and less a, well, ‘food’. Such culinary elitism brings to the table the politics of ‘other’, forks the ‘other’ almost to the extent of oblivion and gulps down the nuance that eating is.
That brings us to the rudimentary question - what is the purpose of food?
Well, for starters, the primary function of food is - drum rolls, to satiate hunger. No brainer, right? One can get a bit scientifically pedantic here and comment that the primary function of food is to aid in metabolism. Food is to the body what fuel is to an engine. We eat, simply because that keeps us alive. While the function of subsistence cannot be denied as a matter of fact, we should also keep in mind another important aspect that the food renders - comfort. By comfort, I don’t mean the physical comfort only - the one you get after filling your stomach after hours of starving. The comfort I am referring to here is mental comfort. Something that soothes you, eases your mind, places you on a tender lap and caresses your hair with a motherly affection.
Why do some specific food items make us feel at home? Why is it so, that even a meagre morsel of some select foods can make us close our eyes in relaxation, slowly savour it as if that’s the last thing on the Earth, wear off our anxieties and make us feel at ease? While it cannot be certainly asserted due to the presence of a plethora of deciding factors, we can safely conclude that certain food items have memories attached to them.
Memories. A small trisyllabic word, albeit filled to the brim with possibilities, potential and warmth. The warmth that the morning Sun gives in a chilly winter morning, the warmth of a cup of steaming hot coffee on a rainy evening, the warmth of waking up after a deep 8-hour slumber, the warmth of meeting your best friend after ages, the warmth that an airport-hug holds. Memories do make us feel warm and comfortable. For this very reason, we can, in all probability ascertain that certain food items with which specific memories are attached to become comfort foods.
Here lies the dichotomy between comfort food and the aforementioned high-dining. Comfort foods, in stark contrast to avant-garde culinary delicacies, are something that are very simple - nothing fanciful, or breaking-the-bank, or difficult to pronounce items with essentially a French or Italian name. More often than not, it’s the most basic food item that you can think of. Comfort is essentially synonymous with simplicity, while showy foods are fraught with luxury, that can often lead to discomfort that we tend to masquerade under the garb of progression.
For me, there are two such food items that I find very dear to my heart, my kind of ‘comfort’ food. Without any surprise, all of them are home-cooked and sans any exception, by my mom. That too, adds to its comfort. These two items are - Khichudi (or Khichdi) and Paayesh (milk-rice). Below I will be discussing them in brief.
Khichudi: Suppose, it’s a rainy evening. It is pouring cats and dogs outside. If you approach any Bengali asking what they would love to have for dinner, they would invariably come up with ‘Khichudi aar Ilish Machh Bhaaja’ (Khichdi with fried Hilsa). However, the role of khichuri is not confined to that only. You are ill? Bedridden with with a bad fever? Worry not, steaming khichuri to the rescue. Procrastinated enough to cook a meal? Again, khichudi becomes the saviour. Who could have thought that a blend of pulses and rice in 2:1 ratio can be so easy to cook, while being extremely flavourful, filling and delicious? Not only that - you can prepare a bowl of khichudi with lots of ingredients, in lots of different ways, with various types of pulses and rice, and different amounts of added water - khichudi opens up a vista of culinary experiments for those who cook with their heart. My mom is such a person who has taken the art of preparing khichudi to the level of artistic brilliance. She inherited it from her father, i.e my maternal grandfather. Name any sort of khichudi and you can get it. Bhuni (dried and grainy) khichudi with mutton keema? Khichudi with winter veggies? Thick Khichuri with moong daal and gobindabhog chaal(a specific type of short-grained rice, having a GI tag from the state of West Bengal)- the ones you get as part of offering to the gods during puja (aka Bhoger Khichudi)? Or thin, slurry khichudi with mushur daal(masoor, aka Red Lentils) and regular rice, the ones suitable for feverish patients? She is adept in cooking them all. She is always experimenting with khichudis, thanks to which we never get to eat the same khichudi the second time. Whenever I am in a bad mood, or not in mood to have an elaborate dinner - I signal at her, and in no time she hurries to the kitchen to prepare some khichudi, while I stand by her, offering some help and chatting all the time. For all such profound memories maybe, khichudi, despite being the commonest culinary item you can find in the Bengali cuisine, never fails to soothe me. No wonder khichuri always tops the list of my comfort foods.
Paayesh (aka Milk-Rice): Before globalisation made its colonialistic and capitalistic way into our otherwise unique distinct culturescapes, we had different ways of celebrating life. We were not privy to the existence of global fast-food chains, still our meals were happy. We were unaware of 51 flavours of a certain ice cream brand, but we were content with cheap popsicles that, in the opinion of our parents, were made of sewage water. Likewise, cutting cakes as a part of birthday celebration used to be alien in Bengali households. Instead of cakes, we had our very own paayesh (the Bengali word for milk-rice) which would be prepared by a motherly figure. For this very reason, birthday cakes never appealed to me as such. Yes, I love the gesture, the warmth, but the affection that is present in the small borosilicate glass bowl full of paayesh prepared by my maa is truly unparalleled. Like khichudi, she is again a pro in making paayesh, but there is a difference. She does not experiment with it. So, every single year on my birthday, she would prepare the same paayesh, with an extravagant amount of cashewnuts and raisins in it. She has an amazing concept of balance when it comes to paayesh - neither too much sweetness, nor too less - just the perfect amount of sweetness you need to enjoy every single spoon of it. She lets the milk boil for a long, very long span of time that thickens the paayesh almost akin to kheer - and a single spoon of it is enough to make you close your eyes and savour. I feel it is just her love for her gourmet son that thickens in the form of paayesh. Not a single dessert item in this world can make me feel so much loved, so much more at comfort than the paayesh that she prepares for me, every single year without any fail, as a ritual.
Hence, we can safely conclude that no matter how basic a food is - if it comforts one, then it is the best food. And, as we all know, the only way to the heart is through the stomach. Likewise, in the case of comfort foods, for me at least, this remains to be the sine qua non of my life.
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