I think the general idea about comfort foods is that part of the comfort comes from associations with childhood and home cooking. And I do have a number of personal comfort foods that hail from my past, like chicken soup the way my mother made it. But I also have adopted a significant number of comfort foods my mother never made. Granted, some of them I frequently had in restaurants growing up, like American-style Chinese food (and we've also visited the topic of the Jewish affection for Chinese food a number of times here on eGullet, most recently here). But in addition, I've added other, more authentic Chinese dishes to my repertoire of comfort foods, like congee and pork belly.
And then there are foods from other cuisines that I never knew about as a child, but have adopted and/or adapted into personal comfort foods. Like southern-style greens with ham-hocks (what business a nice Jewish girl from New York has attempting to make this dish, I can't tell you, but I do a pretty decent job of it if I do say so myself
). And then there's risotto. And sushi. I could go on...Judging from the vast amount of passionate posts here on eGullet about cross-cultural food exploration, I'm sure I'm not alone in this adoption of comfort foods from other cultures. Personally, I think it's really cool.
So--what are some of your own favorite comfort-food dishes that you didn't grow up with, but it feels like you did? (Stories about how you came to discover and adopt that dish would be cool, too.)
