Comfort Food: The Process of Being Comfortable With Food

Below is a short story I submitted for a course I am currently taking involving the importance of food and its significance to memory: 

*The recipe for the tiropita mentioned will be available on the blog at a later time

“Oh no, I’m not gonna eat that crap,” my dad would say. “What! This is no crap! This is good for you, there is no butter, no nothing!” And she was right, there was no butter, but there was something. Layered between each sheet of filo (φύλλο)dough was olive oil margarine, eggs and cheese, and more margarine. But there was no butter, and that equals healthy. Growing up in a family that loved nutrition as much as most people love Thanksgiving dinner, I quickly developed an eating disorder. Suffice it to say, this eating disorder did not center around my weight as much as it did my health and the control over my health. When I was young, I dreamt of being a chef, I would help Grace—our nightly dinner cook—to make dinner and dessert,and that way, I learned many techniques very early on. Cooking was something that I got good enough at that I new how to control even the worst of situations—it was my version of a sick dream. As I got older and began to exercise my passion for food more seriously, I began to realize the paradoxical phenomenon that I was harboring: I love food, I love to make and serve food yet, this desire only lives to serve others. I would suppose this is because I love food so much, I tend to lose control when I eat something good, but with other people, it is not my problem to monitor how much of something they eat.

I don’t know why, but I always remember the lights being off. The windows were large, so natural light danced off the walls but, with the afternoon sun setting, the whole house was matted with a grayish-blue that made me sleepy. My γιαγὶα would set up a stool for me to stand on and, because I was only a few feet tall at the time, and she was a rather large person (both physically and figuratively), I would only come up to her chest when standing on the stool. Her stomach stood out like a little kid’s after a big meal; back perpetually arched, she had a strange body—her legs were thin, and her hips were small but her stomach stuck out like she had attempted to shove a watermelon under her shirt. Every year, γιαγὶα would come from Greece and despite protests from my father, she would make tiropita (τιροπιτα), a Greek pie made of layered filo and feta cheese. She would set up all the ingredients, a short list of flour, water, red wine vinegar, feta, and eggs. She would measure everything by sight, dump it all into a bowl and motion me over. When I was young, I only spoke to say I do it, so I would silently plunge my hands into the warm, mushy dough and she would say, in her heavy accent and broken English, yes πουλακι μου, you do it. As I squeezed the dough in my hands, pushing it through the spaces between my fingers like Playdough, γιαγὶα would step back and let me do the work, trusting me fully to make the fatty star of our family dinner. I would hold my hands up, covered in dough and I always thought they looked like monster hands. Γιαγὶα would take them and put them in between hers, rough and worn, and dunk them into the bag of flour and rub off the excess dough. She would laugh because, unlike most kids, I hated being dirty, and the feeling of sticky, heavy dough made me feel like a ready-to-fry chicken. With the dough formed, I would stand back and let γιαγὶα take over. She assembled the tiropita; One layer of filo, one layer of margarine, one layer of philo, one layer of margarine and so on. She would form a crust, score the top, and after 1 hour the pie was done.

Unlike Greeks, classic comfort food for most American’s includes mac and cheese, mashed potatoes, ice cream, and anything wrapped in, covered by, or sprinkled with bacon however, my family’s idea of comfort food was chocolate sorbet—which is essentially just melted dark chocolate mixed with water and frozen solid in an ice cream tub. Yet, when γιαγὶα made tiropita our rules were sedated. We could indulge yet we all collectively suffered afterward from the guilt of having eaten such a thing. With comments that compared tiropita to shit, crap, or junk food, it became practically impossible to view such a food positively. Yet, with it being the first dish I had ever gotten my hands dirty in, I could not help but personify each tiropita we made, and feel bad for the names being thrown at it. I loved tiropita, not just because of its chewy yet flakey crust, its salty insides, or crispy top, but because γιαγὶα trusted me to make it. As the youngest of three, I always viewed myself inadequate; and so I struggled to give myself the appearance of independence (a decision I am regretting ten years later). But yiayia never saw me as unable, or incapable because I was younger. She knew that if I do it, then I could do it.

Years later, I asked γιαγὶα to write down the recipe for me. She could not. She did not know how much of anything she used and so I begged. She wanted to teach me but I told her I had participated enough times but now I wanted a written version to “remember when I’m old.” She helped me transcribe the recipe, explaining measurements in terms of kitchen tools: “About half a coffee cup of water; two spoons of vinegar; a lot of flour etc.” And so I wrote these things down, and I stored my recipe in between layers of Russian Babushka dolls that, over time, caused the pencil to fade and my recipe became a mere shadow of a dish I would never recreate.

After everything I have baked, cooked, attempted, and failed at, I never once thought to twist open those little wooden dolls and decode the recipe γιαγὶα had given me. Something about it scared me.

And then one day I called my mom. I asked her to send me recipes for tiropita and she told me she could never make it the way γιαγὶα did and hers always turned out like crap. But I asked again and told her to find me a couple of recipes I could put together to recreate γιαγὶα’s from taste and smell. And so she did and as I went shopping for my ingredients, I began to feel pangs of anxiety yet, unable to understand their source, I simply pushed them away.

Once home, I began to form the dough, making a well in my flour and pouring in my wet ingredients. The smells began to resonate, the red wine vinegar, the olive oil—the smell of fresh dough is comparable to nothing else. I began to understand how γιαγὶα did this from memory, the dough needs to feel a certain way, look a certain way, smell a certain way. And then I remembered that I used to eat the raw dough by the spoonful. I decided to taste it, and to my surprise, it tasted right. I had to control myself though as to not eat all the dough in raw form—telling my nostalgia-induced self to save some for the actual tiropita.

Midway through making the tiropita, I realized the source of my anxiety. Tiropita was something I had avoided making for years. I had the material, I had the know-how, Γιαγὶα was only a phone-call away and I had her recipe tucked neatly in my Babushkas. But for some reason, it was something I never attempted. With a dad that weighed his daily dose of almonds, many foods became stigmatized and labeled as BAD, tiropita being one of them. If I made it for myself, not only would I be voluntarily eating something that’s bad, but I would have made it, intentionally for myself. Tiropita is a dish that, with such scientific precision in today’s markets, has become a Greek staple, perfectly packaged into tiny triangles that need only to be heated in an oven for fifteen minutes. Yet, by perfecting it, tiropita becomes imperfect. The idea of not controlling the ingredients in a dish, not knowing the outcome because something changes every time, is a thought that scares me for it is bound for failure at some point or another. I will fail at making tiropita because, no matter how good mine may be, it will never be as good as γιαγὶα’s. It will always fail. And I will always fail to cause the imperfections where they are meant to be caused. By making a dish that transports me to a time before my convoluted relationship with food, where there was no alarm to tell me to stop, I enter a place where the rules concerning food that were once so important become a moot point; and thus, any pain I have caused myself, any denial of foods I have wanted, places I have wanted to try, things I have wanted to make, becomes a moot point. Everything I have convinced myself of, and grown up knowing all of a sudden becomes unimportant, untrue, unnecessary. Tiropita is messy, it covers your hands in wads of goopy dough, it splashed eggs and cheese everywhere, it doesn’t have measurements, it doesn’t require the conventional kitchen skills of a restaurant chef; It is meant to be unorganized, it is meant to be imperfect, it is something that, when eaten, warms your insides like coffee on a cold day. Tiropita isn’t meant to be calorie-counted, each layer dissected and disinfected. It should feel good; it should feel guilt-free. Yet, maybe that’s how all food should feel: Comfortable.