Comfort food is food chosen not for what it does for the body but for what it does for the mood. It tends to be plain and familiar rather than fashionable, the kind of dish that calls back a particular time or place, often childhood or home. People reach for it when they are tired, upset or simply craving reassurance, and the appeal lies as much in the memory attached to it as in the taste itself.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘comfort food’?
The phrase is American and surprisingly recent, only reaching its familiar meaning in the second half of the twentieth century. Dictionary.com places its first recorded use in the window 1955 to 1960, with the core sense already being simple, home-style food tied to thoughts of home or childhood. The two datings do not quite agree: the earliest citation anyone has actually located in print is later than that window, around 1962, in the Independent of Pasadena, California, though still ahead of the examples more commonly cited from 1966. That early usage was closer to a clinical term than a food-writing one, with someone noting that people like soup, adding “It’s what a psychologist would call a comfort food.” By 1966 the plural form “comfort foods” was turning up in coverage of dieting psychology, with the Honolulu Star-Bulletin reporting that the psychiatrist Theodore Isaac Rubin’s book “applauds ‘comfort foods’ for dieters.”
Before this, comfort food carried a narrower and less appealing connotation, naming the plain food given to children, the elderly and the sick rather than anything to be craved. The shift towards the warmer, more indulgent modern sense is usually credited to the actress Liza Minnelli. In a syndicated 1970 interview with the food columnist Johna Blinn, Minnelli described wanting a hamburger loaded with toppings, telling Blinn, “Comfort food is anything you just yum, yum, yum.” The writer April White, discussing the phrase’s history, suggests Minnelli was perhaps the first to use it in this modern, aspirational way, even though isolated earlier uses of the term already existed. After her remark, the phrase spread quickly through food writing, carrying the sense it has kept ever since: eating not for nourishment but for consolation.