Scrambled Eggs with Tomatoes for the Chinese American Soul

The concept of "comfort food" began to creep into conversations during my high school years, but I personally avoided that terminology because it confused me.  Comfort foods as discussed in those conversations were often sweet or rich, usually high carbohydrate edibles that had some likelihood of being fried (with the exception of things like chicken noodle soup).  I thought to myself: those foods don't make me feel comfortable after eating them.  I enjoyed the sweetness or richness temporarily while I indulged; but without fail, I always felt physically or mentally sick (or both) after I had finished such foods.  What made those comfort foods when they do not comfort me at all, I wondered.

Enter the upperclassmen years of college.  The summer before junior year, I asked my mother to teach me the basics of her culinary abilities so that I could feed myself with neither a meal plan nor reliance on anyone else to regularly feed me.  One of the first things I asked her to teach me was Scrambled Eggs with Tomatoes, pictured below and known to practically every Chinese-American as 西红柿炒鸡蛋.  (Yes, I own Big Bird bowls.)

Confused, my mother asked me why, of all things, I wanted to learn to make that.  She gave me many reasons for why she should teach me something else: the dish was simplistic, too easy to make, not that complex in flavor profile, and so on.  Not to put words in her mouth, but she may have been thinking to teach me more difficult things that would automatically cover the simpler dishes such as this.  I had no response.  I just wanted to know how to make it--and how to make it well.

That was the beginning of my understanding of comfort food, not as a specific ethnicity of food or even a methodology of producing and consuming food like take-out or home-cooked.  I began to understand comfort food as a byproduct of upbringing and cultural norms.  Whereas ethnic foods are loosely bound by (and continue to evolve within) the cultures that created and defined the food, comfort food is more nebulous.  And whereas there are some ubiquitous characteristics of an American upbringing that--evolved out of European origins and--lend themselves to certain ideas of comfort food, those characteristics do not restrict this category of food.

As Wikipedia has appropriately defined it, comfort food is something traditionally eaten that evokes feelings of nostalgia or sentimentality.  Rich, sweet foods may evoke comfort for some folks due to individual biology, upbringing, cultural origin, etc.  And I admit that, with no anthropological aspirations, I am hardly doing justice to this topic even for an opinionated blog post.  For myself, a more outspoken foodie than most, food that comforts me takes on a more cultural and personal tint.