COMFORT FOOD FOR THE SOUL

A sermon prepared by Rev. Tim Kutzmark
Sunday, February 17, 2008 • Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading

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“On a hot day in Virginia, I know nothing more comforting than a fine spiced pickle, brought up trout-like from the sparkling depths of the aromatic jar below the stairs of Aunt Sally's cellar.”
—Thomas Jefferson

My great Aunt Jean was a meat and potatoes kind of lady.  There was nothing frilly about her or her food.  But when it came to earthy, old country Polish fare, she knew no equal.  Kielbasa and sauerkraut.  Kiszka.  Perogies stuffed with farmer’s cheese.  Duck blood soup.  Beet Borscht.  Easter Babka.  Apricot and Rasberry Kolaczki.  And the pinnacle of Polish cuisine: Golomki: polish stuffed cabbage.  I could eat Golomki breakfast, lunch and dinner (and when I visited my Aunt Jean, that is often what I did).

Watching Aunt Jean cook Golomki was a marvel, a mini-opera sung without a note.  A cigarette balanced in the corner of her mouth, its long ash dancing dangerously above the pot, she plucked the head of cabbage from the boiling water.  Eyes shut—hands guided by some organic memory passed down from generations of peasant women—she opened steaming leaf after steaming leaf, barely acknowledging the heat searing her fingertips.  Browned ground meat, chopped yellow onions and dark barley were tucked into little green pockets, then plopped down into the cast iron roasting pan.  Breathing heavy, she heaved the overloaded pan at the oven; one strong push from her right hip slammed shut the heavy door.  Taking a final drag on the cig, Aunt Jean would ease herself onto a tall kitchen stool, pour herself two fingers of whiskey, look me straight in the eye and say in that husky voice of hers, “Let’s talk.”

Aunt Jean didn’t care if I was the kid more likely to be slammed into lockers than slamming hits into the outfield. Aunt Jean didn’t care if I was more at home in the library than in the weight room.  She didn’t care if I arrived at her door sullen and withdrawn from my home of hard hands and even harder words.  In her tiny kitchen—full of the tang of tomatoes and cabbage—Aunt Jean loved me back to wholeness.

Author E.B. White once wrote:

“From morning till night, sounds drift from the kitchen, most of them familiar and comforting....On days when warmth is the most important need of the human heart, the kitchen is the place you can find it; it dries the wet sock, it cools the hot little brain.”

Elizabeth David, author of the classic cookbook “French Country Cooking” agrees, saying:

“Some sensible person once remarked that you spend the whole of your life either in your bed or in your shoes. Having done the best you can by shoes and bed, devote all the time and resources at your disposal to the building up of a fine kitchen. It will be, as it should be, the most comforting and comfortable room in the house.”

What does it mean to find comfort somewhere? What does it mean to take comfort from something?  According to Unitarian Universalist Barbara Rhodes, “the origin of the word “comfort” means, “to make strong.” (In the Simple Morning Light, 1994).  To find comfort is to allow ourselves to be made strong again. 

Food can do that in the most essential sense of the word.  As we chew and digest our food, the miraculous mechanism of our body transforms the stuffed cabbage into energy that can move muscles and motivate the mind.  But comfort food is different from ordinary food.  Comfort food provides more than physical strength.  Like my Aunt Jean’s Golomki, comfort food connects us to something greater.  In a world and a pace of life that separates us from most things simple and meaningful, comfort food can reconnect us to the basic essence of being alive.

When I first started dating my partner some twenty years ago, I used to marvel when he ate a piece of chocolate cake.  For Jim, the experience of that chocolate cake was so sensually all consuming it could have been obscene if it hadn’t been so…pure.  As he lifted that first moist bite to his lips, his eyes would close, anticipating the heavy dark aroma.  He would withdraw deeply into himself, moving cake and icing across tooth and tongue.  Expressions of delight and ecstasy animated his face, savoring the subtle difference of richness, sweetness, bitterness, blackness.  He was fully present in the moment, fully alive within his own skin.  It was, and remains, one of the most beautiful and spiritual revelations I have ever witnessed.  The Gods (of chocolate) seemed to dance in him.

But comfort food is more than a massage for the senses.

Sharyn Taitz, a member of our Worship Arts Committee, writes:

“Although I am probably one of the world’s biggest consumers of comfort foods, I have always been skeptical about the ability of those foods to provide comfort based solely upon the mere sensory experiences themselves.  Yes, it’s wonderful to smell my beloved warm potatoes as they are being mashed and then whipped, and even more heavenly to smell the butter, milk, salt and pepper with which I love to season them.  The texture is lovely.  You can even let them squish between your teeth and your cheeks if you want to, as I often did when I was younger.  And potatoes are fun to play with.  You can sculpt them on your plate.  The extent of detail in your artwork, of course, depends upon the texture of your sculpting medium at any given meal.  I have been known to carve Mt. Rushmore into my spuds, before eating them one nose or one forehead at a time.  Mixing mashed potatoes with peas and gravy is another specialized art all in itself.  There are proper ratios of peas to potatoes, for example.  But is all this enough to make the potatoes into a true comfort food?  Is that quick passage of potatoes over my tongue’s small line of salt-sensing taste buds really enough to bring me snuggly bliss?  This skeptic thinks not.”

Sharyn Taitz continues: “I’m not a behavioral psychologist, but I would propose that a comfort food is simply the portal to a much more complex compendium of memories and emotions that we have experienced at some time in our lives.  Much like Pavlov’s dogs, I believe that the smells, tastes and textures of our favorite comfort foods evoke in us actual chemical responses – maybe enzymes or hormones or something – that prod the emotion portions of our brains to flood us with feelings of peace, satisfaction, contentment and several other emotions that would all be filed under “P” for “positive.”   Whether we are actually conscious of the chemistry of it all, we are, indeed, reacting to not only the sensory treats, but to the connections we have made with our favorite foods in our own personal histories.  Without those connections, we wouldn’t call them comfort foods. They would simply be foods that we might describe as delicious or savory or tasty.  Just as we walk into this church community because we know that coming here will fill us with a sense of belonging and safety and community, we “go to” our personal comfort foods because we have experienced them in times or locations or communities where we felt comfort.”

If Sharyn is right, comfort food expands us into connection with something beyond ourselves.  Comfort food expands us, perhaps, into connection with memories, family, friends, ancestors, traditions, God, nature—an entire community of influences pulling us back to our best selves again. As Meg Barnhouse wrote in our reading this morning, “This whole community is like a good soup, with ingredients brought by everyone, lots of colors, flavors, and textures that can feed a body and a soul.”   Comfort food reminds us that there is more to this moment than we can simply see or touch.  Comfort food reminds us that there is more surrounding us than we might perceive. There is more here than we believe.  Hope can touch us.  Grace can carry us.  Not one of us is beyond the reach of God.  Not one of us is beyond the reach of Love.

Elizabeth Gilbert felt the fullness of this love when she traveled to Italy a few years ago.  She went there to restore her weary, worn and famished soul.  In her best-selling book “Eat, Pray, Love,” Gilbert tells of literally eating her way across the Italian peninsula, renewing herself bite-by-bite-by-nourishing-bite-by high-calorie-bite.  She writes:

“I walk through the markets of this crumbly town and my heart tumbles with a love I can’t answer or explain  . . . Is it such a bad thing to live like this for a little while? . . . Is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal?

“I walked home to my apartment and soft-boiled a pair of fresh brown eggs for my lunch.  I peeled the eggs and arranged them on a plate beside the seven stalks of the asparagus (which were so slim and snappy they didn’t need to be cooked at all) . . . For desert—a lovely peach, which the woman in the market had given to me for free and which was still warm from the Roman sunlight.  For the longest time I couldn’t even touch this food because it was such a masterpiece . . . a true expression of making something out of nothing.  Finally . . . I went and sat in a patch of sunbeam on my clean wooden floor and ate every bit of it, with my fingers . . . Happiness inhabited my every molecule. 

“. . . You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.

“ . . . I came to Italy pinched and thin.  I did not know yet what I deserved.  I still maybe don’t fully know what I deserve.  But I do know that I have collected myself of late . . . into somebody more intact.  The easiest, most fundamentally human way to say it is that I have put on weight.  I exist more now that I did four months ago.  I will leave Italy noticeably bigger than when I arrived here.  And I leave with the hope that the expansion of one person—the magnification of one life—is indeed an act of worth in this world.”  (p. 64, 113, 115, 116)

May it be so.  Blessed be.  Amen.

©Copyright 2008 Rev. Timothy A. Kutzmark
All rights reserved.