The Current - Yotam Ottolenghi on comfort food — and saying no to guilt

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

Chef Yotam Ottolenghi’s new cookbook, Ottolenghi Comfort, focuses on recipes that bring us warmth when we need it most, from curries and noodles to a simple chocolate mousse. He talks to Matt Galloway about how what we cook — and who we eat it with — can bring comfort in uncomfortable times.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. If you are a chef, a home cook, or anyone who enjoys trying out different recipes, you probably know the name Otto Lenge. Jotam Otto Lenge has been cooking for over two decades. He is a household name in many parts of this world, and through his recipes and restaurants, cookbooks and newspaper columns, the Israeli-born British chef has changed the way we eat. His new book is A Guide to Comfort Food. The book is Otto Lange

Comfort. Yotam Otto Lhi, good morning. Good morning. Good to talk to you. It's great to have you here. In the introduction to this book, you describe the state of our world right now, and it speaks to why we need a book like this. Do you remember how you described the world? Did we use the term batshit?

You say that we live, these are your words, for the most part, in a batshit crazy world. Yeah, and it could be more true. I mean, it sounds funny, but actually it isn't funny because there's a lot of tragedy and terrible things happening, not the least right now at the part of the world that used to be my home. And it's just heartbreaking for me to see it unraveling like that. The amount of suffering and death is devastating, absolutely painful. But when we started to work on this book a long time ago, before the recent escalation, two or three years ago, and I think we already got that notion that it is a very mad world that we're living in and there's

there's much less stability in people's lives than there was let's say a decade or two ago and I'm talking about the financial crisis but and then and then COVID and now these terrible wars that are happening close to home to many of us. And we just wanted to really focus on home cooking. And I think the instinct was that there was something there about what we do in our own kitchens that is attractive in a time of uncertainty. So you know how during COVID everybody started cooking. It is the most basic human activity. It really is the one thing that unites all of us. But also on an individual level, it's what you do when you, or at least what I do, when

you feel anxious or where you feel you need a bit of solace, where you need a bit of quiet. And of course, it's very hard to escape what's going on in the world. But the only place that I find that I find I can switch off a little bit is in the kitchen. And I think a lot of people feel that way now. So comfort is really, or comfort food is about the experience of cooking and serving people as something that gives you a little bit of a break. One of the things that's fascinating about that is it's really hard to define what comfort food is, that it is a very individual, unique thing, depending on who you are and the situation that you're in, right? Yeah. So I've got three collaborators on this book, Tara, Helen, and Verena. And between

the four of us, we really tried to figure out what it is, what do we mean by when we use the term comfort? Because this book was really not so much about comfort food in the sense that we all know it, which is basically warm, stodgy food, you know, like a mashed potato or mac and cheese or these things that are just immediately say comfort, but more about food that gives you the emotional reaction that I was talking about. They give you a sense of familiarity and connection and a sense of nostalgia as well. So where you get this emotional reaction is with particular dishes. And that is very quite, quite personal. And it's personal to each of every one of us. So, you know, for Helen, it would be Helen grew up in Malaysia. So and and Australia's for

her, it would be rice and noodles and chicken in a particular way, those kind of Asian ways of cooking. And for me, it would be the Middle Eastern dishes like a shawarma, meatloaf and a barakas. And Verena grew up between Scotland and Germany. So she's got a delicious German potato salad that I've never had as good one before. And so we do cover a lot of ground. But actually, there's a lot of things that I think they are that we have in common as a human race in what we love to eat. One of them is noodles and pasta. I think that textural appeal of putting that in your mouth and getting that kind of slurpy.

And this is why we have to have our pasta al dente. The moment it's soft, it's just not a pasta anymore. It doesn't do what we want it to do. it's soft, it's just not a pasta anymore. It doesn't do what we want it to do. So there's a lot of commonalities and there's a lot of differences between cultures and what we find comforting. And we're just celebrating all these commonalities and differences in the book. One of the things you talk about in the introduction is, I mean, there are different ways to look at how comfort can come to us. And one is who we eat with. How does that determine, you know, the idea of getting comfort from food and how food can comfort us? Who we actually have with us around the table or in the kitchen or in the car, if that's where you find comfort? still, despite all the screens we surround ourselves with, we're still social creatures.

And as I said, eating is the most basic human instinct. So having to eat and having to interact with other people is how we define ourselves. And I think that's why it's as old as human history that we define ourselves according to the rituals in which we eat, whether it's a Friday night dinner, whether it's any dinner, whether it's Christmas, whether it's Ramadan, whether it's, it's all our rituals are about eating together, or even sometimes withholding food together as a culture. And we do that. And I think one of the, some of the most beautiful things are sitting around in a group and, you know, eating with your hands, for example. You know, eating with your hands, like breaking that barrier between you and the food, which cutlery does, is like, you know, you take a piece of flatbread and you dip it in a sauce. Whether it's a hummus, whether it's a curry, every culture will have those things that are just kind of, or chicken wing, you know, things that are just easy to pick up and eat with your hands.

And when you do it in a group with your friends and you start a conversation, it's that social aspect that for me is one of the strongest elements of comfort. And yet people can also find great comfort by eating by themselves. I mean, I love sitting at a bar in a restaurant by myself with a book. I find that very comforting, just eating on my own. Yeah, and I do too. I do it less in restaurants, although I've done that also, but I find that at home, like I eat a lot during the day, like test a lot of different recipes. So when I come home and my kids are having their dinner, often I'm not hungry. But then after they've gone to bed, I boil myself a pot of rice and I add some butter,

parmesan cheese, black pepper, and I sit around with a bowl and eat it. If I can read something or watch something in that moment, that very private moment is pure comfort. So yeah, it could be a group, but it can also be used an individual. It also doesn't need to be a complete dish, right? This can just be an ingredient or even a condiment that gives you comfort. Oh, yeah, absolutely everything. I'm trying with the years to be less and less judgy.

How's that going? It's going well, actually, because I realize how fallible I am myself. So I kind of let people do what they do. You know, there's two recipes in this book for hummus. One is a more traditional Arab, Palestinian, Israeli recipe that I ate a lot growing up. And another one is the one that Helen, my co-author, developed. We call it hummus by way of Southern France, which is really not a hummus. It's a chickpea puree uh with uh with also mashed

up fennel and it's got a kind of a nissouas topping olives tomatoes peppers it's really really delicious it's kind of it's the fennel flavor the aniseed flavor really makes it very different and for me taking one of these bowls because you can chill it and have it a bit later of hummus and just eating it with a spoon is pure joy. I don't judge myself for just getting that bowl and just eating it with a spoon and, you know, skipping a meal. Although what I don't like is all these snacks, you know, the protein bars and all these meal substitutes. There's a lot of people that have them these days. But for me, like the ritual of eating should be done with real food and as much as possible

within a group of people, or at least even with yourself to consciously rather than like drive and eat. I find that it's okay. Of course, sometimes you need to do that, but it's really, really, really important to sit around with whatever it is you want to eat and just focus on it for a second, because it's really important. It's really important to focus on what you eat. on it for a second, because it's really important. It's really important to focus on what you eat. We are not eating as a fuel. We're, for me at least, we're eating as a real experience, and I think we should cherish that. Why was it important to write this book? You mentioned the collaborators. To write it with people who could reflect other cultures, because there is a great connection, as you have shown over the course of your career, between immigration and food and the way that the lines of the world kind of cross over each other. So in this book,

how did you want to explore that? So in a funny way, it wasn't important. It just happened to be. But then the richness of the book really reflects the fact that there is so many cultures in the book. For example, there is a recipe for a tomato pie or a tomato galette, which is delicious. It's got cream cheese on the bottom and then lots of fresh tomatoes and a quick-made flaky pastry, which we made with cream cheese. And we added a bit of marmite on the bottom with the cream cheese on which the tomatoes sit before it goes into the oven. And marmite is an ingredient that none of us had grown up with, apart from Tara, actually, because Tara is British, but the other three of us. And we adopted that ingredient because it's such a wonderful source of umami. And the book is full of those things, like

ingredients that we've taken from our childhood or from the various stages of our lives and looked at it from a slightly new perspective, like a more up-to-date perspective of the here and the now. So it wasn't really an effort. The book really benefited, I think, from having all those different perspectives, but we really cook together already. We're friends, we know each other, and we're good. I mean, one of the examples that I love to give in terms of these culinary exchanges, I had to include a ragu or a bolognese that my father, who was Italian, that used to make. And what was particular to his bolognese was that it had no tomatoes or tomato paste.

So it was a white bolognese, which you really tasted the flavor of the meat because he would brown the meat, the beef, and then add like celery and carrots and onion, garlic. But it was really delicious ragout that was all about the meat. But then I gave Helen the challenge to create a bolognese, which was Asian in its essence, like something that does the same thing and uses Asian ingredients. So she made another one with Sichuan peppercorns, using pork, Shaoxing wine,

soy sauce, cilantro, and some quick pickled cucumbers on top. And when you look at it, it looks like a parpadele with a ragu that we know from Italian cooking. But once you start eating, you realize, wow, the flavors are so different, and you really recognize all those Asian flavors. And it's really nice to kind of break your expectations, but also keep it quite familiar at the same time. How do you think, I mean, you mentioned your father, Italian. Your parents are Italian and German. You lived in Jerusalem and Amsterdam and in London now. How do you see all of the food that you have consumed over the course of your travels coming out in what you make now? I suppose the short answer is that I'm just influenced by

everything. And that gives me a lot of freedom to play. And that freedom to play contributes to the richness of the recipes and the books. Because if you stick to one particular culture that you were born in, I mean, of course, you can uncover so many layers. Every food culture is so multifaceted. But if you kind of straddle between cultures and have had that history of kind of tasting different cultures or living in different cultures, then it does give you, it kind of opens you up to different possibilities. One of the recipes that I like a lot in the book that again talks about my two cultures, it's a baked potato, the same as we do, so popular in Britain or where I've been living for the last 20 plus years. But the ingredients are the ingredients of a sabih, which is an Israeli Iraqi pita sandwich.

It has fried eggplants, tahini sauce, amba, which is a pickled mango and fenugreek sauce. And we also added a bit of pickled red cabbage on top. So it's very colorful. It's super delicious. And it really is very, very similar to something that I've had as a child, but also that I have as an adult at home. It's a real combo that kind of captures both cultures really well. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell.

I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. You say that one of the definitions of comfort food that you have no time for is that it can be seen as naughty or a guilty pleasure, the kind of thing that we eat when no one is looking. What's wrong with thinking about comfort food like that? I think we're struggling now culturally with food and sometimes not really for the right reasons. I find that much of the conversation around food today, much to my regret, is about guilt and about health.

And I understand that our health is connected to how we eat. But the way we go about talking about it is really completely the wrong way. You know, there's a lot of shaming going on, shaming and also telling off in terms of how we conduct our meals and what we choose to eat. And people go, oh, you should stop eating sugar, or you should stop eating carbs, or you should not eat meat, or you should not eat vegetables of particular type, etc, etc. And we're just surrounded by this noise, all this advice. And I just find that it could be really, really confusing. And people just forget to know what to eat. And I just find that it could be really, really confusing and people just forget to know what to eat. And this book, we kind of call people to eat what they find comforting and what they

want to eat and kind of put aside the shame, the guilt, and just to trust their instincts. Because I think we really, really lost an incredible skill. And that is just to understand our bodies and what we want to eat and not constantly listen to food trends that can drive you crazy does that go back to the idea i mean you said you weren't pleased with the you know the nature of people gobbling up energy bars and food replacement things that i don't need to eat i can just eat this thing and it's going to provide me the energy that i need that i might get from a meal that we've in some ways forgotten, like the pleasure of eating in some ways. It's the pleasure of eating, but also food is so much more than the nutritional components.

This is where I think we get it all wrong so often, thinking that food is a mixture of nutritional elements that we can call them by a particular name. People go all crazy about the Mediterranean diet and the longevity that it gives you. And they think, oh, if I'll eat olive oils, feta cheese, and some vegetables, I'll live forever. And you had a role in helping to popularize that too. I mean, you think of the popularity of plenty was based in many ways on people looking for that kind of food. But not because I ever thought to want to convince people that it will make them live forever. It's just because I thought this is a great one.

These are wonderful dishes to celebrate and enjoy. And I think the Mediterranean diet taken out of the Mediterranean, which is the whole way of life, is also a little bit of a red herring because just eating those ingredients, I'm sure it's good for you and I'm sure it's delicious. I'll be doing that, you know, for the rest of my life. But I just don't think that that's the whole story. Nutritional components are important, but life in general is so much bigger than that. That's why the meal is so important. That's why sitting together and eating, that's why eating at a particular pace or eating in a way that reflects the terroir or the culture of where you are, I think is really, really important as well. So we just like this reductionist approach to cooking. I just don't like it. I much rather people really

understand what they want to eat and what they love eating. And often the answer is very close to home. It's like what your parents ate and what your great parents ate and what they cooked for you. It's so much better to try and kind of listen to those voices than go on these free-from diets that claim to cure you from so many diseases. But in actual fact, probably you're just depriving yourself from nutrients that you need, maybe not in such huge quantities, but are really good for you. What is it like to know that your own food has become comfort food? There's a recipe. I mean, we cook a lot from your books, but from plenty, the recipe page is splattered with all of the things

that have fallen from the pot over the years for soba noodles and eggplant and mango that is kind of like in our back pocket at home. And that's comfort food for me. What is it like to know that you have created recipes that are comfort food for other people? You know, this is the absolutely best thing in my life is to hear someone telling me, you and others saying, you know, this has become

a family dish. When someone says this has become a family dish, it just means that, you know, books come and go, news articles come and go, but a family tradition tradition like something that you cook really is almost can last forever and when you tell me that i'm just so happy funnily enough that recipe that you described is the one that my mother also was when i started publishing recipes in the guardian many many years ago she used to download the recipes from the from the internet and cook it and this was one of the first recipes she cooked from a garden column. Later it also appeared in Plenty, but she still remembers that

as one of my first recipes that she cooked. You could have just given her the recipe rather than her having to cut it out of the newspaper. We don't live in the same country, unfortunately. You mentioned the need for comfort food and at the beginning of the conversation, just talked about this year. I mean, it's been a really hard year for so many people since the 7th of October. What has this last year been like for you?

It's been terrible. It's been terrible. I've really been struggling and seeing how our region is tearing itself apart. And all I can say is just I feel pain, both for my immediate family that are there and for other people in the region that are struggling and suffering and everyone in their own particular way. And I really, really, really recognize that there's just so much of that suffering going on, on both sides. And it's painful. And I'm in this state of despair because I just don't see how this is going to be solved anytime soon. It seems to just escalate and escalate, and there's just more and more suffering. One of the great books that you wrote is Jerusalem, and you wrote that with your friend and longtime business partner, Sami Tamimi. He has been very outspoken about the war

in Gaza over the last year, has done benefits trying to raise awareness and funds for those who have been impacted by the war. What sort of conversations have you had with him over this last year? Well, we haven't spoken much about it. It has become an issue even between us. It has become something that sits there, you know, even with friends that is extremely difficult to bring up. And I realized through this war, which I didn't really imagine what will happen during this, during my lifetime, that it has become such a divisive moment. It's not easy. It's not easy to talk about these things because it becomes extremely sensitive for everyone.

That's heartbreaking to think about. In many ways, the point of that book was, there's a great line from the introduction saying, it takes a giant leap of faith, but we're happy to take it to imagine that hummus will eventually bring Jerusalemites together, if nothing else will. The whole point of the book in some ways was that food can bring people together in a really divisive time, and that this divisive time has meant that the two of you can't really talk about it. It's, yeah, I can't add anything to that. It is just sad. And I know a lot of people that are trying very very hard to keep the conversation going and the dialogue going uh and i i am trying to and this is something that i think we should we i strive to keep it going a lot of people do strive to keep it going but unfortunately what the nature of this particular conflict or just maybe just conflicts in general, is that it pushes everybody to the extremes and the middle ground is becoming, you know, smaller and smaller. And

it takes a real effort to try and occupy that middle ground. It becomes very difficult. But I think we should all try. We should all try to have conversations, try to cope it on and just hope that when it becomes quieter, you know, fingers crossed, it's going to happen sooner rather than later, we can carry on these conversations and bring some kind of solace and positivity into the future. What about that idea of food bringing people together? I mean, it being a unifying force. Was that ever true, do you think? Food doesn't solve problems. Even when Sammy and I wrote about that in Jerusalem,

there is a very skeptical tone there in that passage that you've quoted. So, I don't think food has the power to solve problems. As humans, we need to really make big sacrifices and have serious conversations with each other if we are to be solving these kinds of problems. But food is what we have in common. So it is a constant reminder that we are humans. We're all humans. We all share something together. And if there is something that we can look up to as a commonality or as a source of commonality, food it is. So if there is a bit of goodwill on both sides and the dialogue does at some point start, then I think that food will be right there at the center of what we find in common and what we can talk about.

In this really difficult year, what is the food that's given you comfort? What's the thing that you've turned to make in your kitchen at night or what have you that just gives you something? For me, it has been, it always is, rice. It's something that, as we all know, it's a cross-cultural food. We all enjoy rice, and we all eat, well, many of us, I think it's almost all cultures eat rice. And the smell of rice boiling in my kitchen and me sitting there and just kind of eating it with a bowl happily, that for me is comfort.

There's recipes in the book that capture those moments. There's quite a few rice recipes, rice as a meal with lots of things in it that you can really enjoy. And when you eat with your friends and family. And yeah, so I would have to say that rice is the one thing that I always go to if I feel a little bit down or I need a bit of encouragement. I feel like we need this book right now. I mean, I hope that people, I've been cooking from it already, and I hope that people, it's a difficult time.

I hope that people turn to it to give themselves a little bit of light. Yotam Ottolenghi, thank you very much. Thank you. It was very good talking to you. Yotam Ottolenghi's latest cookbook is called Ottolenghi Comfort.