Comfort Food from Saveur

How do you write a cookbook about comfort food? For America's popular food magazine Saveur, it took all the right elements falling into place, lots of discussion and plenty of hard work to produce the recently published The New Comfort Food: Home Cooking from Around the World.

It had been nearly ten years since Saveur had last put out a cookbook. "It felt like high time to do another," says James Oseland, editor-in-chief. "We started having casual chats around the office about what our next one would be about, and time and again, comfort food came up in conversations."

What the team realized was that what Americans consider comfort food had changed vastly in the last few decades. "Comfort foods weren't just old-time favorites like meatloaf, macaroni and cheese, and fried chicken anymore," says Oseland. "We were now casually incorporating international foods into our meals, dishes like Thai tom yum goong soup, Eastern European matzoh ball soup, and even French classics like boeuf à la bourguignonne. As Americans we were just naturally eating with a more global perspective. We wanted to create a book that honored that notion."

Work on the book started two years ago, with fellow Bonnier-owned book publisher Weldon Owen providing production support as well as all the contractual and distribution arrangements with the book's publisher, Chronicle. Of course, the Saveur team was responsible for the mouth-watering recipes and the rest of the content.

"We held meetings-lots of meetings-in which we debated about what recipes should or shouldn't be included," says Oseland. "We wanted to curate a lineup of recipes in which each and every one of them somehow immediately evoked the idea of comfort food. We wanted all the recipes to make sense." 

And Oseland's favorite? "Oh, gosh, here we go-the question counterpart to picking your favorite child," he says. "Of the many recipes I adore in the book, two always come to mind, especially when served together: the stir-fried mushrooms and bok choy and the grilled cheese sandwich made with Comté cheese. Is there anything more satisfying than crisp-tender Asian greens and an oozy, gooey, warm cheese sandwich? Of course not!"

If you want to test the bok choy and grilled cheese yourself, you can get copies of the book at bookstores worldwide as well as at Amazon.com.