James Oseland (editor) - Saveur: The New Comfort Food, Home Cooking from Around the World

Last night I cooked the perfect meal. There was nothing new or unusual about it, just split pea soup and frise salad, recipes Ive known for years. But the crisp, bitter greens were studded with smoky bacon, and the yolk of a just-poached egg ran luxuriously over the top. The soup, made with leftovers from a ham Id baked the day before, was warming and rich. Together with a hunk of crusty bread, these dishes made me incomparably happy.

Foods like thesecomfort foodswe dont just eat, we hunger for. They are the chicken soup thats been simmering on the stove all afternoon, filling the house with tantalizing aromas. Or the macaroni and cheese, the version with bchamel and Gruyre, that your family and friends beg you to make. You eat them on the fly, standing up at market stalls: shakshuka, eggs poached in a spicy tomato stew, scooped from a curbside pot in Jerusalem; or crisp-fried spring rolls stuffed with pork and rice noodles, gobbled in a busy Bangkok market. They are restaurant classics: the crunchy fried chicken that a neighborhood joint is famous for, or the linguine tossed in white-wine sauce with mussels and shrimp at that Italian-American place we keep going back to. No matter where theyre eaten, comfort foods are the ones weve known and loved forever; the ones we ate as kids and the ones we yearn for as adults. Theyre the foods that taste like home, wherever you happen to be when you eat them.

These are the dishes that weve always celebrated in the pages of saveur magazine: soulful, honest, traditional fare that transcends trend and defines the way people eat all over the globe. Every cuisine has its canon of comfort, the foods that folks crave above all others and the ones they eat day in and day out. Those are the recipes youll find in this book: for good, old American stick-to-your-ribs fare, like Texas chili, Rhode Island stuffed clams, chicken pot pie, and patty melts; and for international dishes like guacamole and French onion soup, whose comfort the world has claimed as its own. There are the great pastas of Italy, like fettuccine Alfredothat irresistible tangle of pasta, butter, and cheeseand homemade tagliatelle egg noodles with slow-simmered, meaty rag bolognese. There are the lusty one-pot meals, like boeuf la bourguignonne, and oven-baked triumphs like potatoes gratindishes that French cooks affectionately call cuisine grand-mre, or grandmas cuisine. All told, this compendium represents some of the best traditional home cooking on the planet.

Theres also something new about this collection of comfort foods. It reflects just how much the category has grown. If youre like meI came of age in postwar California, raised by parents who loved to cookyou might have grown up on a far-reaching diet of foods like tamales, bagels and lox, Chinese spareribs, and, yes, meat loaf. But today, our comfort-food vocabulary is even broader. We have access to it all: fresh lemongrass, Israeli couscous, handmade corn tortillas, dried baccal. We travel more. Americas population continues to become more diverse. And weve learned volumes about the way the world eats.

Hair and makeup artists, working at a fashion show at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, break for a lunch of burgers.

Shoppers at the Mercato Orientale, a busy market in the heart of Genoa, Italy.

Diners enjoy peel-andeat boiled shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico.

At SAVEUR, weve always been interested in where these foods come from, and weve trekked to the places where theyre produced. Weve marveled at the producers ingenuity: the gristmills that grind wheat into flour, the aging rooms where cheeses develop their flavors. Weve come to understand the historical and cultural contexts that shape a cuisines character: the trade routes, the agricultural traditions, the ways people obtain their food. Weve learned to use cooking tools like seasoned woks for making Chinese stir-fries and clay tagines for Moroccan stews, and weve embraced techniques for everything from extracting the flavor from lemongrass to evenly slicing carrots.

Most of all, weve come to know and admire the people who acquainted us with these dishes. Some of them are chefs, to be sure, but most are people making a living serving great foodlike Jos and Gloria Fonseca of Los Angeless La Abeja caf, whose huevos rancheros introduced me to the pleasures of Mexican breakfast; and the Mississippi Delta line cook Brandon Hughes, who deep-fries catfish like nobodys business. Theyre home cooks preparing meals for family and friends: people like saveur contributor Alia Yunis, who gave us her Palestinian-Lebanese mothers exemplary recipe for hummus; Aggeliki Bakali, from the Greek village of Pertouli, who taught us how to make hortopita, a savory pie of wild greens wrapped in homemade phyllo dough; and even my dad, Larry, whose method for marinating and grilling flank steak yields a charred, salty crust and a perfectly pink center.

This book is a tribute to those great cooks and to all the valuable lessons weve learned from them over the years. In the sidebars and notes that run alongside the recipes, our editors and contributors share their stories, as well as kitchen wisdom and ingredient information that inspire and empower us as cooks. The dishes these people make is food for the body and soul. We cant help but give ourselves over to it. Thats the beautiful thing about comfort food: no matter where it comes from, it awakens our senses and lifts our spirits. It comforts us again and again.

JAMES OSELAND