Bee Wilson was bereft when her marriage suddenly ended after 22 years. But solace came from meatballs, eggy bread and her most beloved meals. She talks to four other people who pieced themselves back together with food
The day after my husband first said he didn’t love me any more, I made a Nigella recipe for: big wodges of white bread soaked in egg with parmesan, dijon mustard and Worcestershire sauce, fried in butter to a deep golden brown. It reminded me of the “eggy bread” my mother would make when I was a child. The week after that, having told our children their dad was leaving, I made meatballs from the Falastin cookbook by Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley. It’s fiddly but worth it.
Among the many griefs of separation, one of the lesser annoyances was being stuck doing all the cooking . I felt like a needy child who wanted someone to cook for me, except now this person had to be me. The surprise, though, was discovering the kitchen was actually where I wanted to be. But life resists happy endings. After The Comfort Food Diaries was published, Nunn found she still had a huge amount of grief and pain to process. And then she got cancer. She locked herself away alone in a house in North Carolina belonging to a family member, thinking if she could stay away from other people, she could save herself from “the pain of bad relationships”.
He works with scientist Barry Smith to develop recipes that can still be enjoyed by those whose sense of smell or taste is impaired, for example by boosting the levels of umami in a dish with miso or Marmite, or by adding a squeeze of citrus to cut the sweetness in dessert . The question of comfort cooking is personal to Antal, who is recovering from cancer. As she has written on her excellent blog, before she had made it to 42, “I’d lost a sister, parents, grandparents and two close friends”. Cooking the Hungarian food of her father is one of the most meaningful ways she can live with these losses. “When he died,” she wrote, “I made cauldrons of[goulash soup] to feed visitors from Hungary. We ate it by the bowlful, salted with our tears.