Can't Put a Price on Comfort
Comfort foods are different wherever you go in the world. France has fondue, Italy has pastas and pizzas, Germany has schnitzel, Japan has hot pots, Sweden has meatballs, Greece has moussaka, and England has bangers and mash. And then there's Louisiana…
But there are many comfort foods that transcend borders: fluffy rice dishes, slow-cooked soups, starchy potato plates, melty cheese spreads, and warm buttery sauces.
Classic comfort food commonalities are that they're usually warm dishes, home cooked, hearty, and based on ingredients that are easily available in the region. Depending on how your grandma made them, they might be a little burnt on the edges, runny, goopy—it doesn't really matter, as long as it tastes like home. What does matter is how much butter you use (the more the merrier).
Traditional American favorites are pies, cookies, biscuits, dips, burritos, burgers, lasagnas, hot meat sandwiches, soups, stews, dumplings, pancakes, tacos, and anything fried, drizzled, or stuffed. While comfort food comes with a certain sentimentality to those who were raised on it, you don't have to be particularly familiar with a culture to know when you're eating food that feels like a hug. If it's smothered in butter and slow cooked past perfection, along with the kind of calorie intake that requires running a marathon or having a lay down, you've found it.
Can You Make a Roux?
As the holidays come, we're all especially craving sentimental soups, stews, and sauces. A long-established classic comfort dish in Louisiana is gumbo (the #1 answer after polling local friends and going into an online rabbit hole) but most of our food fits the bill, so here are dozens more dishes worth making or seeking out if you're craving that comfort feel.
Jambalaya, a distant cousin to gumbo, is our delicious local answer to paella, filled with rice, meat, fish and vegetables.
Red beans and rice is the classic start to a week. It's a slow-cook, one pot, Monday night veggie, starch, meat combo, where it isn't about the presentation and you can throw in leftover chunks, bones, ham, and sausage from your weekend feast.
Bite it Before it Bites You
Pork chops are quick and easy cuts of meat to grill, fry, bake, or sear and eat with cabbage, green beans, or apple sauce (smothered in creamy onion gravy is also a great way to go).
Dishes made of deer meat—stews, steaks, chilis, and jerky—are a winter seasonal go-to for much of rural Louisiana. Since comfort food is heavily influenced by accessibility, our diverse ecology means that more unusual proteins might remind locals of favorite home-cooked meals. If your family grew up hunting and fishing around the state, maybe fried squirrel legs, a rich tomato-based squirrel sauce piquante, duck roast or étouffée, or turtle soup (which Louisiana is one of the only states in the U.S. that still serves it) will make your kitchen smell like your grandma. Alligator bites and gar balls are dishes that usually require generations of skill, but what is comfort food if not about getting together with friends and sharing old recipes and time spent in the kitchen?
We can thank Ms. Linda Green for the world's best yaka mein recipe, a hearty Creole beef-based soup combined with Chinese noodles and brimming with spices. This is the perfect noodle dish to fill your bowl with once you feel some chill in the air.
Dressed for Dinner
If you're craving a sandwich that will fill you for days, you can opt for a po-boy (roast beef with debris for meat eaters or deep fried shrimp, oysters, crab or crawfish with all the fixing) for pescatarians.
There's also the muffuletta. Go back to our Sicilian ancestry for this absolutely stacked slammer with olive salad (which could contain mushrooms, olives, carrots, peppers, onions, and capers), ham, salami, swiss, provolone, and mortadella, all on sesame bread.
While not classic to Louisiana, there's nothing quite like baking a massive rack of ribs, a lasagna, a meatloaf, or a casserole. For the pescatarian route, baked catfish is easy to find cheap and fresh in local grocery stores, and all your breadings and cornmeal are shelf-stable kitchen staples.
Crawfish may go in and out of season but a seafood boil can be brilliant with shrimp or crabs in any month, and crawfish étouffée is still delicious with frozen crawfish tails, as long as your holy trinity ingredients and topping herbs are fresh.
Stuffed mirliton is a vegetable-forward side dish, primarily filled with shrimp, seasoning, and bread. Occasionally there's andouille hiding in there, but it's an excellent non-meat option as you can really fill it with whatever you're in the mood for.
There's creamy soups, which we all dream of when the temperatures drop: shrimp and corn with tasso and corn and crab bisque are personal favorites.
Fried anything that's in season in a shell is also an emotional experience and Oysters Rockefeller tops many people's lists.
Beyond the Holy Trinity
For some vegetarian options, how about: a creamy sweet carrot soufflé, cast iron skillet cajun cornbread, pasta with roasted garlic red pepper sauce, green beans almondine, spicy pan fried brussels sprouts in avocado oil, french onion soup, eggplant parmesan, fried okra, grilled mushrooms, mac 'n' cheese, smothered cabbage, loaded, cheesy baked potato casserole, chili, or southern black eyed peas (just skip the sausage and bacon bits).
There's no way we've listed every dish in this article, but we certainly tried. And hopefully one of these will be one of your new favorites or spark the memory of another.
Happy comfort food season. May the "holy trinity" be with all y'all.
