Comfort food is too often dismissed. The unfussy dishes we ate in the halcyon days of youth. The foods we cooked for ourselves when what we ate had virtually no consequence: melting cheese onto whatever we could find; microwave meals that were a feat of physics, as hot as the sun on the edges but still icy in the center; the buckets of take-out fried chicken; a cannery worth of salty soups. The dishes that our parents or grandparents made for us, tethers to places that our families left behind. The endless parade of casseroles that march through when a baby is born or someone has died.
