Comfortable

 Let's start with an easy one: Just about any sandwich someone makes for you. 

That's comfort food. 

Another seemingly universal component of this corner of the world's diet is the plate of crackers and ginger ale brought to you when you were sick in bed by your mother. 

A great deal of the food I was served by my mother qualified as comfort food. I grew up in a household where mom spent an hour or two each day in the kitchen, preparing a meal for my father, my brothers and me. It was a casserole-based menu that kept us boys running to the kitchen most nights, and I wish now that I had paid more attention to the recipes that passed by in front of us. 

I know that they were written down. I remember the tin box that served as her guide. Filled with three by five cards penned with her cramped but impeccably neat handwriting, the exact details of which were known primarily to herself and the occasional family friend who wanted to swap meal ideas for their hungry brood. 

I have never eaten a bowl of cream of mushroom soup. Not all by itself, but I know that the magic my mother performed in the kitchen on a regular basis had me ingesting gallons of the stuff through combinations of chicken and tuna and noodles and rice that made us come back for more. 

Most nights.

There were those dinners that turned out to be favored by one of my brothers, and I would patiently wade through those because I could expect with a solid degree of certainty that tomorrow night would be one of my favorites. 

Add to this steady stream of dinners the very unique and simple pleasure of buttery cinnamon toast on the occasional chilly morning. And the cakes. And the cookies. The output from my mother's kitchen would have had you believe that she was chained to the stove all day every day, but she managed to find time to escape to the living room on regular occasions to play piano and read books and magazines like they were the fire stoking the furnace of her mind. 

And occasionally, she might run across a recipe. 

And her legend grew. 

She also made a pretty amazing tuna fish sandwich.