Comfort Food

Take a baby from its mother. Kill it, and cut it up into fillets. Dip the fillets into flour and/or bread crumbs, and into milk. (The latter can be procured from the baby's mother, who now no longer needs it.) Cook in a tomato sauce, add lots of parmesan cheese. and serve. (The said cheese, of course, has been made from the milk of other mothers whose babies have been taken from them and killed.) Presto, veal parmigiana.

Of course not all veal parmigiana is equally good. For today's New York Times article on comfort food--veal parmigiana, above all--experts were consulted:

The sequence makes a huge difference," said Lisa Bamonte, whose family owns Bamonte's restaurant in Brooklyn. "You need the flour to make the egg stick, and the egg to make the bread crumbs stick." (Melissa Clark, "Comfort Blanketed in Red," Feb. 4 2015, D1)

Do we really need any of this in order to have food that comforts us? I'm in New York on business this week, and I happened to read this Times article in a restaurant in Brooklyn that's very different from what Bamonte's must be. It's a wonderful neighborhood Latin vegan restaurant on Fifth Avenue near DeGraw. Salsa and amazing chips to start, and then for the main course a warm and wonderful mix of kale and chickpeas and tofu (plus a taste of ginger and coconut), with quinoa om the side. And with salsa; the bottle gets left on the table, so those (like me) who appreciate additional warmth with their comfort food have it to hand. And with two glasses of an excellent red--more comfort on a cold day in early February.

Maybe humans could have comfort food without killing babies and taking the mother's milk that would have gone to the little ones for ourselves. Actually, scratch that maybe.

We could. We can. We should.