22 September 2026
Comfort food accompanies the return to everyday life. Discover why some dishes convey a sense of balance and continuity after summer.
With the arrival of September, many habits change, including the way we eat. Summer gives way to more organized days, schedules return to regularity, and the kitchen follows this trend. Salads prepared in minutes, impromptu dinners, and lunches eaten away from home slowly begin to give way to recipes that require more time, more care, and a different level of attention. It's at this time that the call of comfort food returns.
The expression is often associated with nostalgia, childhood dishes, or family recipes. It's a correct definition, but incomplete. The success of comfort food speaks to something more current. After weeks in which everything has been more unpredictable—from times to places, even meals—the desire to rediscover a certain continuity grows. Some flavors manage to restore it with surprising simplicity.
A baked pasta dish, a creamy soup prepared when the early evenings become cooler, a risotto, a homemade cake, or the smell of freshly baked bread create a sensation that goes beyond taste. They have the power to make an ordinary day familiar. Not because they are extraordinary dishes, but because they belong to a memory built through repeated gestures over time.
Every culture has its own repertoire of comforting foods. In Italy, this idea often coincides with home cooking, made up of simple preparations. In Japan, it might be a bowl of ramen, in the United States mac and cheese, in France onion soup. The recipes may change, but their function remains the same.
The restaurant industry has also embraced this shift. More and more restaurants are reviving traditional dishes, slow cooking, and preparations that evoke everyday cooking rather than spectacular fare. It's a response to a public that, at least at certain times of the year, seems to prefer the pleasure of familiarity to surprise.
Comfort food, therefore, speaks less of the past than one might imagine. Every time we choose a particular dish, we're building a small habit, a stable reference point in our ever-changing days. It's a mechanism that affects the present even before memories. Preparing a familiar dish, sitting down to dinner calmly, or rediscovering flavors that have been part of our daily routine for years becomes a simple way to restore balance and make us feel, at least for an hour, in the right place.
