Herrine Ro: In these stressful
and uncertain times of quarantine,
people from all over the world
are seeking comfort in food.
Comfort food can fix any bad day.
It's typically high in sugar, fat, and/or salt.
And the beauty of comfort food is that it varies
from person to person.
It's rooted in where you're from
and who you grew up with.
We asked 20 people from different cultural backgrounds
to share what comfort food is to them.
I'll start with mine.
My favorite comfort food is kimchi jjigae,
or kimchi stew.
I'm Korean American,
and, growing, up my mom made kimchi jjigae
pretty often for dinner.
My mom's kimchi jjigae has that son-mat.
Son-mat in Korean means, like, hand taste.
The best way I can describe it is my mom's special touch.
Even if I try to make my mom's kimchi jjigae
here in New York City, I can't get that taste
because it lacks my mom's special touch.
So, basically, the flavors that you're getting
are, like, spicy, salty,
fatty, sour.
It's basically everything that I crave
when I'm missing my mom.
Tomi Obebe: I'm Nigerian, and one of my favorite
comfort foods has to be amala and okra soup.
To make it, you take some yam flour
and you pour it into boiling hot water,
stir it up very quickly,
and it gets to this nice thick consistency.
From there, you portion it out to whatever size
you'd like for your meal.
And then you can dip it into your soup of choice.
And not only is it a super-tasty meal,
but after you eat it, [snaps] it hits you,
and it puts you in one of those nice food comas.
I remember sneaking into the kitchen as a toddler
and trying to tear off small pieces of amala,
or, like, the eru seeds that they put in the soup
and taking it back to my playroom.
So, of course, now anytime that I have it,
I just automatically think of home.
Sarah Isoke: I'm Trinidadian,
and my favorite comfort food is bake and saltfish.
Bake and saltfish is a dish comprised of bake,
which is dough rolled out,
and a fish called bacalao.
It's a salted cod that we chop up, we boil,
and we sauté with sweet tomatoes and sweet onions.
I think it's my favorite comfort food just because
it brings back a memory of my grandmother.
She used to own a daycare, and whenever she was
making something with dough, like bake,
she would roll up little pieces of the dough
and give it to the children to play with.
And we would just
go crazy for those little pieces of dough.
Matthew Ferere: My favorite Haitian comfort food is griot.
Griot is fried pork shoulder that has a special cut
where it has just the right amount of fat
and just the right amount of skin on it.
You would season it well,
bake it briefly,
and then fry it.
So, after that, it'll get that nice
crispy on the outside, tender on the inside taste.
I can remember being a child,
you know, at every Haitian gathering, family party,
if you had griot on your plate that night,
you knew it was gonna be a good night.
Lisa Paradise: My comfort food has always been pastina,
which is like a really unhealthy version
of Italian wedding soup.
It has no vegetables.
It's really just pasta and meatballs.
So, the way that my mom makes her meatballs
is really what I always crave.
She does a mix of pork, of ground pork,
ground beef, and ground veal.
And then she adds in just five ingredients.
So, the five ingredients are salt, pepper,
garlic powder, parsley, and cheese.
It's not just, like, Parmesan cheese;
it's always pecorino Romano cheese.
That's, like, the go-to key ingredient.
Whenever I go home or whenever I'm, like,
sad or sick or whatever,
that's what I want my mom to make me,
or that's what I, like, want to eat.
Naja Newell: I'm from New York, and my favorite
comfort food is grilled cheese.
Growing up as picky eater,
grilled cheese was the No. 1 thing I could get
from every single family member
and every single restaurant
and it be almost the exact same every single time.
So, today when I make grilled cheese for myself,
I just use white or wheat bread,
and I'll use white American cheese.
It reminds me of being best friends with my mom.
Alyson Brown: I'm Alyson Brown, and today
we're gonna talk about beef patties,
because that's my favorite Jamaican comfort food.
Growing up, my father used to bring home,
like, a box of beef patties.
And he used to put them on the table
and it was first come, first serve,
and if you did not get your beef patty,
you would be tight.
I love beef patties because of how diverse they are.
You could get a beef patty, a callaloo patty,
a ackee patty, any type of patty.
My family is Jamaican.
The're from Jamaica.
I'm American, I was born here.
But when we go to Jamaica, it's over.
The patties are, like, hot and ready. They delicious.
Manuel Silva-Paulus: I'm from New York, I'm Dominican,
and my favorite comfort food is mangu.
Mangu is basically like mashed potatoes,
but instead of potatoes,
it's plantains.
And it's a breakfast food,
so most Dominicans will eat it in the morning.
Mangu is typically eaten with cebollas on top,
which is onions;
queso frito on the side,
which is fried cheese;
salami, which is a type of meant;
and usually, like, some people will get a fried egg on it.
Personally, I love eggs, so I always get them on it.
The reason why mangu is my favorite comfort food,
besides the fact that it's delicious,
is because it just reminds me of being
in the Dominican Republic and just, like,
being around great weather, sunny,
like, just an all-around great vibe.
Selena Singh: My comfort food is pepperpot.
It came from Guyana's first people,
known as the Amerindians.
Pepperpot is a meal that is boiled with cassareep
and spices and any choice of meat,
but my personal favorite is beef.
It can be eaten with anything;
bread, cassava bread, rice,
anything you would like.
Pepperpot reminds me of Christmastime
and all the family time
and a rich culture in Guyana.
Samantha Lee: My favorite comfort food is congee,
a type of rice porridge.
It's often eaten with yau ja gwai,
also known as a Chinese doughnut.
There are also many different types of congee.
I've had it plain, with dried scallops,
with preserved egg and salted pork,
and just whitefish.
Growing up, my mom would
make this for breakfast some days,
and she would also make it for me when I was sick
and I couldn't keep any solid foods down.
My mom passed away in January of 2018,
so the process of making congee and eating it
reminds me of her love, her dedication,
and her patience as my mother.
Isabella Paoletto: I'm Mexican American,
and my favorite comfort food is tamales.
Every year, my grandma and her sisters get together
and they all make tamales for us to eat on Christmas Eve,
so it really reminds me of home
and of Christmastime and of my family,
so it's really special.
My family makes the dish with shredded pork
in a red chili sauce with green olives.
Basically, right now only my grandma
and my aunts know how to make it,
but they've started to teach me and my mom
and my sisters how to do it, so that way,
we can pass it on to the next generation.
Harry Kersh: My favorite comfort food is Marmite on toast.
It just has this really rich, really savory,
and quite salty flavor.
And it's just really comforting,
especially when it's put on some thickly buttered toast.
I have very vivid memories of eating Marmite on toast,
particularly when I was feeling a bit sick.
I had an operation when I was 3 years old.
I went under general anesthetic.
When I woke up, the nurse said,
"Is there anything we can get you?"
And my first request was Marmite on toast.
Nisha Stickles: My favorite comfort food is kuay teaw,
or Thai noodle soup.
Thai noodle soup is the Thai equivalent
of what a deli sandwich is to New Yorkers.
And you can customize each kuay teaw order to be your own.
My go-to order is kuay teaw ped,
so duck noodle soup with sen mee,
which are the rice noodles that are thinner
than the ones you have in pho.
And I only will eat it in this one noodle shop,
and I refuse to have it elsewhere
because they just make it so special.
And it sucks because I can't really replicate
that experience in any Thai restaurant here
since they don't really specialize in that.
Jennifer Hernandez: My favorite comfort food
are Colombian arepas.
Arepas are cornmeal patties that are typically made
with salt, water, and masarepa.
This is my favorite comfort food
because when I was a kid, my dad and I
didn't have matching schedules at all.
So by the time he would get home, I was already sleeping,
and we wouldn't see each other till the weekend.
And at the weekends, our favorite
family-time activity was to make arepas.
It was also the first meal I learned how to make.
So, we're gathered in our tiny kitchen.
Mold them together, put it in the stove top,
and then once they were ready and hot,
my dad would put butter on top,
sprinkle it with a little bit of cheese,
and it was delicious.
And it's still one of my favorite meals.
Cory Villegas: My favorite comfort food is
Puerto Rican pasteles de yuca.
In Spanish, we call it amasa.
It's like a doughy kind of thing.
It has, like...
you can put stuff in it.
So, you can put, like, meat, chicken,
you can put vegetables.
I mean, they wrap it around a banana leaf,
and then they boil it.
And we make them in bulk.
I mean, it takes two to three days to make.
It's my favorite comfort food
because my aunts and my mom, they sit around,
we talk, and they're making this dish
that is so reminiscent of our Puerto Rican culture.
Caroline Aghajanian: My comfort food is lahmajun.
It's a thin flatbread, almost like pizza,
that's enjoyed in and around the Middle East.
It's typically made by taking small dough balls
and flattening them into really thin pieces,
and then it's topped with beef or lamb,
some vegetables, and spices,
and then it's cooked in the oven for just a few minutes.
My family and I typically buy a dozen or so of them
from Armenian bakeries or grocery stores here in LA
because they make them really tasty.
Arturo Valenzuela: My comfort food is aji de gallina.
It's a spicy chicken mixture
that my grandma used to make all the time.
A yellow pepper that's found in Peru, aji amarillo,
is mixed with, you sauté some onions,
then you're gonna add some chicken broth, milk,
and crackers or bread.
It's a nice little paste sauce,
and then with some boiled chicken that you shredded.
Aji de gallina reminds me of just Peru in general.
Living there, my grandfather had
50, 80 chickens,
and my grandma would just grab one,
and it would be fresh.
Ruqayyah Moynihan: I'm British Pakistani, and my favorite
comfort food is a dish called aloo ki tarkari.
The reason I love this dish so much
is because it's a curry.
It's very carby as opposed to one with lots of gravy.
My mum usually adds to it
aloo, potatoes; mirch, chili;
namak, salt; haldi, turmeric;
and then she adds something called panch phoron,
which is a blend of five spices.
You blend the spices, you fry them,
you add your chopped-up potatoes, add water,
boil the water off, and let the potatoes break up.
It's really heartwarming, very flavorsome.
And it also reminds me of coming home from school
and cooking with my mom,
learning to cook with my naani, my mom's mom,
who passed away a few years back.
Barbara Corbellini Duarte: My two favorite Brazilian
comfort foods are cheese bread and feijoada.
For cheese bread, there's definitely not an occasion.
It's just everywhere, all the time.
You can eat it at any time of the day.
It's without a doubt the food that I miss the most
because it's just the perfect snack.
Feijoada is basically
a giant black bean soup.
It's definitely something that I grew up eating,
and it's very iconic in Brazil.
Almost everyone eats it.
Aynour Elkasaby: My favorite comfort food
has to be ful, which is fava beans.
And it's usually served hot.
And it's really easy to make,
so that's why we make it all the time.
It contains tomatoes, onions,
some people put tahini in it,
and we put in it a lot of spices.
Usually, people eat it with pita bread.
It's my favorite comfort food because, over the summer,
my grandpa would make it for breakfast a lot.
So we'd wake up, and it would be there.
So it reminds me a lot of home.
Herrine: As social beings,
social distancing may not be easy.
Let's do what we can and make the most of it
by enjoying our favorite comfort foods.
Let us know what your favorite comfort food is
and why in the comment section below.