If I had to guess, I suspect your favorite dish has something to do with a happy childhood memory. A time of gathering around a table with people you love and who love you. At those special times, this food will be present. A dish that everyone knows is required at a family gathering. It somehow reinforces that this is a place where you belong. Something would be off, out of sync, if your favorite food was not on the table.
I would further guess that your favorite food is also a culturally relevant dish. And I mean culturally relevant in the most micro sense of the word. Your family culture. Yes, it may be part of a larger identifiable cultural group you belong to, but your family does it in a way you have made your own.
For me, this cultural food that invokes special memories is ham and beans.
Once a year, in the heat of the summer, everyone gathers for Reunion. Family members travel from across the United States to reconnect with their siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins and relations so many times removed we just refer to each other as “related”. Reunion has been a ritual since the 1980’s.
In the early days of Reunion, everyone knew that my Grandma and her siblings would cook a big cast iron pot full of ham and beans over a fire. They started early in the morning and simmered the beans until lunch time. No matter who arrived late or who might need to leave at a certain time, the meal would not start until Grandma announced the beans were done.
Forty years ago, I could count on finding Grandma in her webbed lawn chair at the edge of the woods. Her basic cotton dress covered by an apron and her long-handled spoon in hand. Her surviving siblings circled the campfire, each in his or her own folding chair, watching her tend the pot of beans.
They reminisced about former days and caught up on family news. They leaned first to one and then the other to note an item of interest.
Who had moved since the last reunion? Who had babies? Who had been married?
At the behest of some internal clock, Grandma would stand up at regular intervals and reach into the pot with her spoon. She would stir and answer the inevitable question from the circle:
“How close are they?”
“Oh, just a bit longer,” she would answer.
Grandma would give an approximation, but everyone knew she could time it down to the minute.
Meanwhile, relatives continued to arrive, arms laden with food. Cold dishes nestled into the ice-filled kiddie pools. Hot dishes in crockpots plugged in to the many extension cords. Flatbed wagons and makeshift tables of sawhorses and sheets of plywood filled with the pride of everyone’s kitchen. Pans of cornbread and tubs of butter arrived.
The aroma of ham and beans mingled with wood smoke filled the air.
Rumbling bellies responded.
At long last, but always according to Grandma’s plan, twelve noon arrived, and she announced the beans were done. Children were called from the fishing pond and games to wash up. Adults stopped their conversations and looked expectantly toward the table.
After the obligatory group photo and prayer, the lines began moving around the food.
We ate salads and sliced tomatoes. Potato casseroles and sweet corn. Pickles, and beets, and noodles. We jostled for desserts, swooning over chocolate cake and fruit cobblers.
But always the feature was those beans, poured to the brim of a bowl with cornbread crumbled in.
After all family members, from old to young, were filled to what should have been capacity, many of us returned for another bowl of beans and cornbread.
Yes, after dessert.
That’s right. In my family, we finished the reunion meal with more beans and cornbread.
I know, this humble dish created from cheap beans seasoned with scraps of ham bone and bits of meat, boiled in plain water, was a staple meal for our ancestors in hard times. They survived the Great Depression after all.
Now that generation is gone.
The entire group of siblings that included my grandma, who prepared the annual pot of beans, have passed on. Even though we no longer need to eat cheap because of hard times, we continue the tradition.
We honor them by keeping faith with their food. Filling each other with warm stories and a bowl of beans. Remembering as we do, the generations who came before and brought us to the brink of where we are today.
Why do these special dishes mean so much to us? I know that my family is not alone in its own food culture.
What makes us refer to these special foods as “comfort foods”? The dictionary defines “comfort” as: a state of physical ease and freedom from pain or constraint; or alternately the easing or alleviation of a person’s feelings of grief or distress.
For me “comfort” is found in the memories of happy times. Times when both body and soul are full. A time to be unconcerned, even for the span of a mealtime, about all the pressures of the world. A time to simply enjoy what is before me.
Ham and beans do that for me. This humble meal reminds me of my connections to traditions and the place in a family where I belong. It is my place in the world.
While I go start a pot of ham and beans, here is my challenge to you:
Spend some time today thinking about your favorite food.
What memories accompany this dish?
Where were you and who was with you the first time you remember eating your particular favorite?
Does it bring you comfort?
Now, go make that dish.