In review: Ottolenghi, Comfort

Having successfully explored the boundless potential of vegetables with 2010’s ‘Plenty’, fuss-free midweek meals with ‘Simple’, and low-effort, high-impact dishes in ‘Flavour’, the award-winning British chef and restaurateur returns to bring us comfort food, Ottolenghi style.

Featuring over 100 irresistible recipes, reproduced with the same quality of photography we have grown to expect from these innovative titles, in ‘Comfort’ a simple bowl of pasta becomes caramelised onion orecchiette with hazelnuts and crispy sage, a warming soup is cheesy bread soup with savoy cabbage and cavolo nero, and a plate of humble mashed potato is transformed into garlicky aligot potato with leeks and thyme.

A collaborative approach, described as “the work of four hungries”, sees input from Yotam Ottolenghi and his troupe of familiar co-authors, Helen Goh, Verena Lochmuller, and Tara Wigley, as they each weave memories of childhood and travel into a celebration of home and food; recognising that whilst no comfort foods are ever identical, they do share key themes and serve similar functions, traversing generations, as well as cultures.

For example, Yotam’s dishes draw inspiration from his parents’ Italian and German heritage, along with his own experience growing up in Jerusalem, and Amsterdam where he lived, and by his own admission, ate his own body weight in coquettes. Helen’s recipes, on the other hand, reflect both the Chinese culinary inheritance her grandparents provided and the Melbourne of her youth.

However, whilst in this sense 'Comfort’ can certainly be read as a celebration of global movement of people and their ideas, it places equal value in the comfort of stillness and virtues of what can be discovered locally. It asserts that living in such a busy and fast paced world can lead to us becoming disconnected from the sources of the food we eat, with many of our ‘on the go’ options being overly processed and overly packaged, we can’t always “smell the strawberries in the punnet” or recognise the ingredients in our supermarket sandwich.

With the ‘Comfort’ approach to cooking – “real cooking using real ingredients” – it seeks to offer us “a natural way to reconnect with the environment, with our fellow human beings and with ourselves”.