In a shift of schedules, I underwent some minor periodontal work this week, and it’s forced me to recalibrate my meal-planning for the week. After two injections of Novocaine and an hour in the chair, I was handed an ice pack and a list of instructions: no extremes of hot or cold food, no extremes in spicing or acidity, alcohol only in moderation, and most importantly, no seedy, crispy, or crunchy foods of any kind. This was a bit of a system shock to me: it’s the height of summer, and my idea of a good day of eating is a bowl of nutty granola and yogurt; a salad of coarse greens with crunchy root vegetables and a dash of ACV; and thick slices of toothsome steak and sliced tomatoes garnished with torn herbs. Instead, it’s been porridge, soup, and pasta for the last few days, all in varying spoonable shades of beige.
There are plenty of people who don’t mind these kinds of restrictions on their diets, and there’s lots of historical precedent to show that smooth, creamy food is, for many, more normal and appealing than eating for maximum textural contrast. As the British food writer Bee Wilson documents in her book First Bite, the concept of “nursery” foods in the nineteenth century emerged as a reflection of Victorian society’s preoccupation with notions of purity and stability. Children were given simple, carefully composed, and supremely bland dishes as a way of ensuring proper digestion, eschewing ingredients such as garlic, capers, or chilies (and by extension the many non-Western cuisines that depend on these ingredients for flavor) for fear of them being too stimulating. As Wilson puts it, “nursery food treated children as if they were permanently on the verge of nervous collapse.” Catering to children’s tastes prompted politically freighted debates about the taste and biological distinctions between childhood and adulthood, and about different strategies in parenting that range between the “scientific” and the “natural.” As explored by Amy Bentley in her scholarship on baby food, women who subscribed to philosophies of “natural motherhood” in the 1970s often prepared their own baby food, as one way of showing their adoption of a “voluntary simplicity” that ran parallel with other critiques of capitalism and the industrialized food system. Whether children or adults were the target of the nursery food industry, their purees and puddings were always enriched by a larger dose of political or moral philosophy.
But the type of food they prepared, also sometimes called “white food” or “comfort food” has never been solely confined to nurseries; instead, it’s become a catch-all category for any kind of food that is simple and restrained enough to not call attention to itself—food that has no pretenses towards gourmand status, and makes almost no claims towards reflecting what global cuisine actually can be. Nursery food brooks little culinary innovation—perhaps a dash of French influence here, or Italian seasoning there, but nothing that deviates too far from a bland potato or wheat-based norm. A gastropub, even a great one that draws extensively on the British pub tradition, cannot offer true nursery food, because it so obviously aspires to gastronomic heights. Nursery food is contented to be exactly where it is—flat, white, often served in a bowl, with crackers being the only thing to give it variety.
The best places to find foods that fit this category are at restaurants that anchor themselves in American—and particularly “Yankee”—cuisine, offering the “good old-fashioned” chowders, potato mashes, and brown breads that dominated the Puritan culinary tradition. The historians Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald called the New Englander’s adherence to traditional English food a way to conjure a “virtuous simplicity” that sought to stave off the influence of New World worldliness, a “ritual obeisance to the region’s supposed originating piety, industry, and frugality.” The traditional Thanksgiving dinner consists primarily of foods that adhere to these standards: a minimally seasoned and dried out bird that necessitates a drippings-based gravy, a bread or cornbread-based stuffing, and bowls of potatoes, carrots, and other blandly sweet or starchy vegetables. It’s no wonder that the chef Samin Nosrat was drawn to cranberry sauce at her annual table—it’s often the only thing that breaks through the hum of salty, starchy richness, and provokes us to sit up and notice the meal.
There are plenty of joys to be had in the simplest of meals, especially if prepared well, and I wouldn’t turn my nose up at a great macaroni and cheese or mashed potato on any menu. And this week has yielded some unexpected pleasures—my first post-surgery meal was an extra-thick strawberry frappe not slurped (as the dentist prohibited), but eaten with a long spoon. (Debate it if you want, but some of the best ice cream spots in the U.S. are still the dairy-adjacent spots up and down the Eastern Seaboard.) And one of the great bonuses of parenthood is the chance to scoop up the nursery-food leftovers from my kid’s plate—the odd nuggets of slightly dried-out scrambled eggs, the crusts of grilled cheese sandwiches, the fluffy cottage fries from the local diner’s kids’ menu. Sometimes I want bland food because it gives me permission to enjoy eating like a kid—to suspend, even for a few moments, my loftiest gastronomic aspirations.
But especially in the dead-end days of summer, I find myself looking forward to the intentional composition of the layers of meals, the change to find multiple flavors, textures, experiences in every bite. I didn’t realize how significant crunch, acidity, and spice were as elements of my favorite meals until they’d been prescriptively withheld from me. For me, nursery food doesn’t function as comfort food unless it gives me a chance to wake up my senses—to take the bowl of poached eggs and yogurt and add a sharp spoonful of chili crisp on top. And as soon as my doctor signs off, I’ll be crunching and spicing up my food once again with gusto.
Recommendation: A slow week for cultural consumption, but I’m happy to have a friend to upvote in this section: my dear friend KC Hysmith’s marvelous examination at Eater of the Barbie Cake, a much-coveted object of my desire as a child, and perfectly timed for the release of the Barbie movie. (No, haven’t seen it yet, going on Thursday). I particularly love KC’s recap of Martha Stewart’s failed attempt to gourmandize the Barbie cake, a perfect novelty item if there ever was one, but offering a little kid the change to top her cake with dragées, and the little girl demuring for star sprinkles instead. Wise move, kid. And fantastic piece, KC.
The Perfect Bite: It was a frustrating week of having to put consistency over quality, and so many of my meals were reheated mush at home. But I was pleased that, during my day of working on campus this week, I managed to snag a platter of miscellaneous salads and panelle from Clover (not one of my favorite fast-casual spots, but a Harvard Square staple). Yet another one of the great foods made with chickpea flour (see also: socca), a slab of panelle is a fantastic (and chewable) addition to any meal.
Cooked to Completion: Lots of very boring cooking to write about this week, but I did find two excellent breakfast recipes this week: one, a traditional Scottish porridge that’s a bit thicker and chewier than most and holds up well to sliced fruit and a nice drizzle of treacle (or maple syrup for the Americans), and a great batch of buckwheat waffles (which I made with a DIY buttermilk made from macadamia milk). I usually don’t put a ton of energy into breakfast (despite routine aspirations to do so), but oddly breakfast lends itself to the soft foods experience far better than other meals…so when life hands you surgery, you must turn it into a better breakfast.