If a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, how does a comfort food tour begin? With a single recipe? With a kind word? With a generous, loving offer of safe harbor?
Emily Nunn's journey of a thousand miles began with all of those things, leading her down a road reconnecting with friends and family she had thought lost to her, and into a kind of healing she needed more than anything in life, and which she thought would never come. Eventually, it led to "The Comfort Food Diaries: My Quest for the Perfect Dish to Mend a Broken Heart," her singular, poignant and beautifully written memoir chronicling that search in vignettes so personal and at times so dark yet moving, that the words will rip your heart right out of you.
"When I started, I was so broken," Nunn said in an interview from her North Carolina home. "It's hard to explain how completely lost I was."
She wanted to cook with and be around people _ people who maybe had difficult lives _ "I wanted to see how they did it." How they coped.
Nunn is a journalist and food writer. A Southerner, born and raised in Virginia but living in North Carolina now, she writes freelance for such publications as Food52. Her comfort food tour was born in Chicago after a particularly cruel fall from what seemed the top of the world.
After nearly 10 years at The New Yorker, she moved to Chicago about 15 years ago to take up arts and food writing for the Tribune, a job she loved. In 2008, she moved to Good Eating (the former name for what is now Food & Dining), where she wrote deftly about such topics as her love of the toum (a garlic sauce) at Fattoush restaurant, or her fangirl crush on Ina Garten. I was a fan of Nunn's writing (her 1,400-word rant against 2004's rather new plague of made-up food holidays made me her fanboy), but I didn't know her well. Certainly not well enough to know what was going on in her life away from Trib Tower.
By 2009, she had been laid off by the paper, like so many in those dark days of Tribune's bankruptcy (from which the company emerged in 2012). I didn't know what she was up to, where she was living or how she'd find work in a recession, when like hundreds of other Facebook friends, I read her raw cry for help in the night.
Nunn was struggling with much more than a lost job. Her brother had killed himself, her fiance had broken off the engagement _ and basically taken away his daughter, whom Nunn had come to love as if she were her own. In the book, Nunn reconstructed that post, writing, in part: "I have almost no money, no job, no home, no car, no child to pick up after school, no dog to feed, no one to care for. I am cold and alone" _ and she was drinking again after being sober for years.
The next morning, she expected a "virtual scolding" in an avalanche of Facebook comments, but instead woke up to an outpouring of love, offers of help (including a place to stay and money) and empathetic admissions of painful struggles. This, from distant friends and relatives and people she didn't even know well from across the country. Come visit, they said. We'll cook for you. Which meant, we'll take care of you. We'll ease the hurt. Make it a culinary tour, said a former sorority sister from Savannah, Eileen. And this seemingly crazy idea, from an old New Yorker friend, Kevin: "It should be your comfort food tour."
In short, that's what Nunn did. She launched a comfort food tour, and it was brilliant. Though real life is not as pat as a Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland plot, as Nunn references, the idea appealed because it gave Nunn something to do.
"I had to have this project: 'Come and we'll make comfort food for you,'" Nunn said. There wasn't much of a plan, at first. "It wasn't fleshed out. But it ended up being much deeper and richer. It ended up really changing my life. It's about this path I had to take."
"Comfort Food Diaries" is not an addiction and recovery book, per se; Nunn handles that subject quickly. She doesn't dismiss it; she gives it weight _ including a breakdown that led to a psychiatric ward stay and a separate stint at The Betty Ford Center _ but she spends her time with the reader talking about other things: focusing on how she got to where she was in life and how to be happy.
Did she ever really find the answer to her quest? This is where she said she might cry.
"It's like the really corny line: It's the journey. You have to keep going with your life. The journey became the end.
"Did I find the perfect dish? No, of course not. Did I find what was missing from my life? Yes, I did. Really true connections with human beings. Saying yes to things, not being afraid."
"It was not the idea of wrapping it up into a neat little bow at the end. That is never what I was after. I was after finding out how to live, how other people live." An open heart with kindness, forgiveness. Not a wary way. "I'm a completely different person now. Not completely different, but I'm changed. My relationship to things, the way things look, achievements, the exterior signs of a great life, I'm a lot less attached to those things now.
"I live in a barn, and I'm happy. The things I valued in people changed a lot. I am a lot more into kindness."
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EMILY'S OWN
SPOON BREAD
Prep: 30 minutes
Cook: 50 minutes
Makes: 10 servings
From "The Comfort Food Diaries" (Atria Books, $26) by Emily Nunn.
1 1/3 cups cornmeal
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons granulated sugar
2 1/2 cups whole milk
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, melted
5 large eggs, separated
1. Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a large souffle dish or 9-inch square casserole. In a large bowl, mix the cornmeal, salt and sugar with a whisk or fork. In a small saucepan, bring the milk to a boil, reduce the heat and simmer. Slowly stir in the cornmeal mixture, whisking until it begins to thicken. Remove from the heat, and stir in the butter.
2. In a small bowl, beat the egg yolks by hand; in a larger bowl, whisk the egg whites until stiff peaks form. Once the corn mush has cooled slightly, stir in the egg yolks. Next, gently fold in the egg whites.
3. Pour the mixture into the souffle dish and bake for 40 minutes. The middle should be soft but not loose. Serve immediately, with lots of butter.
Nutrition information per serving: 194 calories, 9 g fat, 5 g saturated fat, 111 mg cholesterol, 21 g carbohydrates, 4 g sugar, 7 g protein, 413 mg sodium, 1 g fiber