Famous faces reveal their ultimate comfort food
We all comfort ourselves in different ways. I do it with spare ribs. With a sauce-slathered bone in my hand, I am myself when young. I was always the one who got the bones at dinner time when I was a kid. Back then I assumed it was a privilege accorded the youngest child, because I couldn't quite imagine why nobody else wanted them. Chicken wings and drumsticks, the curious ankle bit on the leg of lamb, the meatiest of chops, a ribbon of crisped fat at its back: all of these were mine. I liked the sanctioned informality of eating with your hands, the way you ended up looking down your nose at your dinner as you nibbled. It was – and remains – completely absorbing.
That's the thing about comfort food. It takes us somewhere safe and cosy and simple. Many of the things we eat have this unique ability to transport us – a fresh tomato salad with hand- torn leaves of basil and glugs of the greenest, most peppery olive oil can help us re-experience, for a moment, a long-gone summer in the Tuscan hills; a raw oyster, prised from its sticking place on the half shell and taken in one, is the quickest route back to that day by the English shore with the rush and crack of surf on shingle.
Comfort food does exactly the same thing, only it takes us so much further back. It is no accident that, when asked to name his comfort foods, one of the things the cook and food writer Anthony Bourdain mentions is soft-boiled eggs with crumbled buttered toast, because that was something his mother gave him when he was a child. (Funny, it was also something my mother gave me.) Or that Beth Ditto mentions her mother's gravy, Nick Frost his mother's stroganoff, Lulu Kennedy her granddad's shepherd's pie. Dinner time is the most basic form of nurture, and when it's happening very little else matters. Likewise, by recreating those flavours we can banish, for a little while, all the dreary complexities of adulthood.
From comfort foods we seek something that roots us, that reminds us of exactly who we are. And knowing who we are means knowing where we came from. A photograph is good at doing that and an anecdote can be wistful and sweet. But the way something tastes is the greatest, most comforting time machine of all.
*Goldie, musician, 48*
Growing up in care, I got used to the kind of meals that work for feeding 25 to 30 kids – things like sausage and mash, toad in the hole, bacon and eggs – but I first associated comfort with food when I'd go home at the weekends and visit the Jamaican side of the family. The smell of Jamaican cooking, be it in a home kitchen, a patty shop in Ladbroke Grove or Junior's Caribbean takeaway in Dalston – the don of patties, mutton and kingfish – is, to me, home. And home means comfort. The kitchen is where the love comes from. The smells, the pots and pans, all the dried and fresh ingredients, the heat from the Scotch bonnets catching your throat, it's all so sensory and beautiful.
It must be why this dish of mine, Cliffy's Chicken, brings me so much love when I make it. I put my apron on and it's like downtime for me. I'm in a world of my own. I've tweaked the recipe over the years, which centres on really good chicken, spices, Scotch bonnets, tomatoes, onions, coconut milk and coriander, and it's the one thing my wife, who is a truly spectacular cook, can't recreate properly. It's the only thing I have over her.
She's from Montreal and Japanese Dutch, so it's been funny for her learning all these strange English traditions, like having a roast dinner every Sunday. "What do you mean you want this every Sunday?" she'll say, and I have to sit her down and be, like, "Babe, this is how it is." You cannot beat a Sunday roast, man, you just can't.
Although I am very partial to beans on toast. Beans have got me through some of the hardest times in life. I remember, in some of the roughest years, not really having a pot to piss in, I'd make myself dumplings and have a tin of beans with them and feel like a king. If I could shoplift a packet of potato waffles, even better. If I'm sat with a cup of Tetley's, a plate of beans on toast with some fish fingers, too? Mate. You can't touch me.
*Gareth Pugh, designer, 32*
The meal that most reminds me of being at home in Sunderland is my ultimate comfort food – a proper Sunday roast, a big fat chicken with all the trimmings: mash, veg, Yorkshire puds, gravy. I recently got into little poussins, but they're more or less the same, just smaller. It's the smell of a roast that does it for me, when it fills the house on a Sunday afternoon. All the family are together and then dessert is served to all in front of Antiques Roadshow – what more could you ask for? I definitely think food should be shared and find eating alone a sad experience.
I miss a lot of the foods I can't get hold of now for geographical reasons, like my nana's ginger and chocolate cake, which she used to make every Saturday for the family tea. I miss out on that now that I live in London. Also, stottie bread [a large, round flat bread] is nowhere to be found and I often bring a few back on the train if I've been to visit the family. Fish and chips always taste better there, too, by the sea – although I recently found a great place that serves amazing fish, chips and mushy peas in Paris, where I spend a lot of time – and I miss my dad's lasagne. Nothing comes close.
On the very rare(!) occasion that I'm hungover, it's all about comfort. I just eat anything that's in the fridge at the time, something that involves turning on the oven and bunging it in for 20 minutes. Who can be bothered cooking from scratch when you can't even stand up straight? Coca-Cola would be high on the hangover list, too. It's black nectar at such times.
*Nick Frost, actor, 41*
I think we should amend that old saying about death and taxes to include food and eating. It really is that important. That's why the idea of comfort food, to me, is essentially a time machine back to when you were little. It's the best way to reconnect with our past, which is why it soothes us so.
Along with the Findus crispy pancakes that seemed to feature quite heavily, my mum used to make stroganoff, which was the first thing she taught me to cook. Now she's gone it's a way of connecting with her, through something we both loved. It tastes exactly the same as when she made it and so, for the time it takes me to eat it, I'm young again. I'm watching her slice onions. I have the same thing with Heinz tomato soup. Pie in a bowl with instant gravy, loads of white pepper and, depending on how low I feel, ketchup, is another favourite comfort meal. It has to be a small, shop-bought one, and I might also have a slice of white bread with butter to make a kind of pie sandwich near the end. I once told Simon Pegg we had pies in the freezer when we were a little worse for wear and he excitedly set off for the kitchen. When he opened the freezer it was completely empty and he turned around with a look on his face I'll never forget: shocked, then withering disbelief. Disbelief that I would, or could, lie about such a serious thing.
Nowadays, a bacon sandwich and a cheeky pint at lunch straightens everything out. Me and Mrs Frost have also been known to have a Whopper when it gets really bad. Pleasure shouldn't be guilty, though. The nearest I get to that is smuggling eight digestives up to bed to dunk sneakily in a nice cup of tea.
*Beth Ditto, singer, 32*
It's so difficult to narrow down the thing that's the most comforting, but if I have to, I'll say dill pickles. I feel like if there are pickles in the fridge, everything will be OK.
If we're talking homemade dishes, it has to be biscuits and gravy, southern-style. My mum makes the most incredible biscuits, but I can't make gravy as good as hers. There's even a chocolate gravy which very few people have heard of – it's a dish that only true southerners know. I make mine simple, with no herbs, just bacon scratch [the sticky bits left on the pan], milk, flour, salt and pepper. It's one of those dishes that seems so simple, but takes years of practice to perfect. Biscuits and gravy is a long process and when my mum, a nurse who worked a lot and was gone on weekends and holidays, took the time to make that for us seven kids, it made us feel taken care of. She'd always say, "Sick people don't take a day off," which meant we rarely had Christmas on the 25th or Thanksgiving on the actual day.
There's a reason traditions and celebrations centre on food – from fasting to eating a holiday meal till you bust at the seams while your uncle is sitting on the couch loosening his belt for an after-dinner nap, food is central to our sense of joy and comfort. Look at every episode of Seinfeld. They're always eating!
It's easy to forget that we're not bad people because we enjoy food, and so much importance is placed on rewarding people for denying themselves food. I'm fat, so people will have words about me talking about food, but that's normal. All my friends love eating and cooking for people, making each other feel part of something.
I have a "chosen family" Christmas at my house each year, taking in all the weird, orphaned adults whose parents live too far away or who have been denied a warm, giving atmosphere around the holidays. People bring dishes their parents or grandparents made.
When I'm travelling and need comfort I rely on Subway. Why? Because I can have as many American-style pickles as I want!
*Anthony Bourdain, chef, 57*
The first thing I crave when away from home is a good New York pastrami sandwich on rye. That is comfort for me. I also have an unholy affection for cheap macaroni cheese and spicy food when hungover, like leftover Szechuan food. Spicy scares the evil out.
If I were going to cook something for myself, it would be a Naples-style pasta with ragu or, as it's known in New Jersey Italian America, "Sunday gravy". It'd be oxtail, braciole, beef neck or shank slow-cooked in tomato sauce until falling off the bone. I've always been bitter about the fact that I'm not Italian American. They always seemed to have more fun and better arguments.
The idea of comfort food, to me, is the dish I need right now. Sometimes that's a hamburger, other times a bowl of pho that reminds me of happier, more romantic times. Or it could be soft-boiled eggs with crumbled, buttered toast, which is what my mother would make me when I was getting over a cold as a child – comfort food as a kid was directly related to maternal love; home, safety, security and the familiar – and is still perfect if I'm feeling blue. A baguette slathered with Normandy butter, dipped in hot chocolate, is another taste of childhood.
I absolutely believe in guilty pleasures. Mine include Popeyes' fried chicken, In-N-Out burgers, nasty sausage and pepper heroes from street fairs (guaranteed to cause gastrointestinal disease every time), deep-fried haggis with curry sauce, dirty-water hot dogs and obscenely expensive sushi.
I believe in the separation of food and sex, like church and state. While beautiful food can elicit similar physiological responses, I don't want food and sex in close proximity. There's nothing sexy about bloat or flatulence.
*Cornelia Parker, artist, 57*
Something like fish soup rates high on the comfort-food list for me. A bouillabaisse, or a monkfish stew – anything wet with fish in it, really. If I see something soupy and fishy like that on a menu, I have to have it. I went to Portugal at the beginning of the summer and we went to the same restaurant every night of the week, as you do, and I had monkfish stew four nights out of six. It was light, but incredibly comforting.
If I was cooking? It's difficult to say these days as my husband tends to monopolise the kitchen. Sometimes my young daughter and I will curl up on the sofa and watch Masterchef (we're obsessed with cookery programmes) while he cooks, which, to me, is about as comforting as it gets. He often cooks risottos, pastas, things like that, but as he's Texan we often get fajitas, which all hit the spot.
It's usually something starchy that you equate with comfort, isn't it? As a student I was very fond of making a potato casserole, sort of a moist potato lasagne with layers of thinly sliced spuds. It's based on a Scandinavian recipe where they add herring. When I'm let back in the kitchen again I'll look forward to pulling that one out the archives.
When I was a child we lived on a smallholding and grew vegetables, living in a very primitive way, but my mum would always overcook all these lovely veg in a pressure cooker to a pulp. We'd often have onions as a main, though, which must be where my undying love for them comes from.
A curious thing happened to me at school, though, in that all I wanted to eat was beetroot and red cabbage – pickled, boiled, you name it. We'd sit in tables of eight and I'd be the only one eating the salads. I still adore both things now, but these days I roast beetroot. There's something about that taste of the earth that brings huge comfort to me.
*Lulu Kennedy, fashion guru, 43*
Shepherd's pie with HP Sauce, chips and peas is my ultimate comfort food. My grandad always made it for me without fail. It was our special thing and I associate it with him and feeling super safe and happy. If I'm cooking, I do a good macaroni cheese with crispy bacon bits sprinkled over the top, served with a glass of red.
My never-fail hangover cure is pizza covered in Encona Caribbean chilli sauce and an ice-cold Red Stripe – and I remember vividly as a kid being desperate to be a grown-up so I could eat what I want when I want, and I still get a kick out of having ice cream for breakfast if I fancy it. On the subject of ice cream, my best friend's mum used to feed us Arctic roll as a treat and it seemed so exotic! I still crave it because I associate it with her and being happy.
When you travel with work you often need comfort and I take my own PG Tips with me whenever I go abroad. I get in a right mood about piss-weak teabags.
I love Mexican food, so if I was trying to combine an ultimate blow-out feast with comfort, I'd have be a huge heap of my favourite tacos al pastor and cochinita pibil imported fresh from Tulum, fresh chopped mangoes with lime, a nice bottle of sipping tequila, such as Patrón Gold, and a cigar. I'd also like a Mariachi band, but is that pushing my luck?
*Yotam Ottolenghi, chef, 44*
Comfort food is about eating the right food in the right place at the right time. It's when this connection between a dish and a certain context comes together that foods makes most sense and is comforting to me. In this way, any food can be comforting depending on the time and place, whether that's a can of smoked oysters for breakfast or a glass of red wine and pasta at the end of the day.
I don't think comfort foods have changed much for me really: a plate of warm hummus with crushed fava beans and a drizzle of oil, seared prawns with butter and lemon or a handful of Baci chocolates.
I always cook pasta or noodles for myself, but another real favourite is eggs with lots of herbs and whatever bits of cheese I've got lying around – feta is kind of essential. Runny eggs with melted cheese is the quickest, simplest solution for a pang of unexpected hunger. But my true comfort dish, I think, would be brown rice with miso vegetables. I use broccolini, carrot, mangetout, cucumber, mushrooms, and a black sesame dressing. It's hard to beat.
Food, for me, is synonymous with sharing and chatting, friends and family, and that's the case for any dish. And isn't true comfort in a relationship about being able to be free and "alone", even when you're not? I can't eat as much as I used to be able to so the stop button is easier to press these days, although I sometimes wonder whether it's right to enjoy Love Hearts and Fruit Mentos as much as I do.
*Azealia Banks, singer, 22*
Although my ultimate comfort food is loaded potato skins with bacon, I'll often make an amazing roast chicken with candied yams (sweet potatoes slow-baked with butter, brown sugar and marshmallows) and kale. It's a great combo. It reminds me of my family – my sister made roast chicken a lot for the family so it just sort of stuck with me. It's so soothing and nourishes different parts of you. Food nourishes your body and sharing these things with the people you love is really satisfying. It's great if you can cook a favourite dish for your boyfriend or girlfriend, or impress someone new with your ability to cook.
If we're talking guilty, comforting pleasures, mine has to be candy. Particularly Haribo Gummy Bears. As well as candy, I love steak. It's a guilty pleasure because red meat is so bad for you! When I was a kid I used to really love McDonald's. Who am I kidding, it's still great.
When I'm travelling and need to eat something familiar for comfort it has to be sushi. I love sushi. Sugarfish by Sushi Nozawa, which has branches across Los Angeles, is the best. In fact, one of their "Trust Me" boxes, with everything from tuna sashimi, halibut sushi and edamame to blue crab hand rolls, would be my death-row meal. That, and a bottle of sauvignon blanc. Reported by guardian.co.uk 8 hours ago.
We all comfort ourselves in different ways. I do it with spare ribs. With a sauce-slathered bone in my hand, I am myself when young. I was always the one who got the bones at dinner time when I was a kid. Back then I assumed it was a privilege accorded the youngest child, because I couldn't quite imagine why nobody else wanted them. Chicken wings and drumsticks, the curious ankle bit on the leg of lamb, the meatiest of chops, a ribbon of crisped fat at its back: all of these were mine. I liked the sanctioned informality of eating with your hands, the way you ended up looking down your nose at your dinner as you nibbled. It was – and remains – completely absorbing.
That's the thing about comfort food. It takes us somewhere safe and cosy and simple. Many of the things we eat have this unique ability to transport us – a fresh tomato salad with hand- torn leaves of basil and glugs of the greenest, most peppery olive oil can help us re-experience, for a moment, a long-gone summer in the Tuscan hills; a raw oyster, prised from its sticking place on the half shell and taken in one, is the quickest route back to that day by the English shore with the rush and crack of surf on shingle.
Comfort food does exactly the same thing, only it takes us so much further back. It is no accident that, when asked to name his comfort foods, one of the things the cook and food writer Anthony Bourdain mentions is soft-boiled eggs with crumbled buttered toast, because that was something his mother gave him when he was a child. (Funny, it was also something my mother gave me.) Or that Beth Ditto mentions her mother's gravy, Nick Frost his mother's stroganoff, Lulu Kennedy her granddad's shepherd's pie. Dinner time is the most basic form of nurture, and when it's happening very little else matters. Likewise, by recreating those flavours we can banish, for a little while, all the dreary complexities of adulthood.
From comfort foods we seek something that roots us, that reminds us of exactly who we are. And knowing who we are means knowing where we came from. A photograph is good at doing that and an anecdote can be wistful and sweet. But the way something tastes is the greatest, most comforting time machine of all.
*Goldie, musician, 48*
Growing up in care, I got used to the kind of meals that work for feeding 25 to 30 kids – things like sausage and mash, toad in the hole, bacon and eggs – but I first associated comfort with food when I'd go home at the weekends and visit the Jamaican side of the family. The smell of Jamaican cooking, be it in a home kitchen, a patty shop in Ladbroke Grove or Junior's Caribbean takeaway in Dalston – the don of patties, mutton and kingfish – is, to me, home. And home means comfort. The kitchen is where the love comes from. The smells, the pots and pans, all the dried and fresh ingredients, the heat from the Scotch bonnets catching your throat, it's all so sensory and beautiful.
It must be why this dish of mine, Cliffy's Chicken, brings me so much love when I make it. I put my apron on and it's like downtime for me. I'm in a world of my own. I've tweaked the recipe over the years, which centres on really good chicken, spices, Scotch bonnets, tomatoes, onions, coconut milk and coriander, and it's the one thing my wife, who is a truly spectacular cook, can't recreate properly. It's the only thing I have over her.
She's from Montreal and Japanese Dutch, so it's been funny for her learning all these strange English traditions, like having a roast dinner every Sunday. "What do you mean you want this every Sunday?" she'll say, and I have to sit her down and be, like, "Babe, this is how it is." You cannot beat a Sunday roast, man, you just can't.
Although I am very partial to beans on toast. Beans have got me through some of the hardest times in life. I remember, in some of the roughest years, not really having a pot to piss in, I'd make myself dumplings and have a tin of beans with them and feel like a king. If I could shoplift a packet of potato waffles, even better. If I'm sat with a cup of Tetley's, a plate of beans on toast with some fish fingers, too? Mate. You can't touch me.
*Gareth Pugh, designer, 32*
The meal that most reminds me of being at home in Sunderland is my ultimate comfort food – a proper Sunday roast, a big fat chicken with all the trimmings: mash, veg, Yorkshire puds, gravy. I recently got into little poussins, but they're more or less the same, just smaller. It's the smell of a roast that does it for me, when it fills the house on a Sunday afternoon. All the family are together and then dessert is served to all in front of Antiques Roadshow – what more could you ask for? I definitely think food should be shared and find eating alone a sad experience.
I miss a lot of the foods I can't get hold of now for geographical reasons, like my nana's ginger and chocolate cake, which she used to make every Saturday for the family tea. I miss out on that now that I live in London. Also, stottie bread [a large, round flat bread] is nowhere to be found and I often bring a few back on the train if I've been to visit the family. Fish and chips always taste better there, too, by the sea – although I recently found a great place that serves amazing fish, chips and mushy peas in Paris, where I spend a lot of time – and I miss my dad's lasagne. Nothing comes close.
On the very rare(!) occasion that I'm hungover, it's all about comfort. I just eat anything that's in the fridge at the time, something that involves turning on the oven and bunging it in for 20 minutes. Who can be bothered cooking from scratch when you can't even stand up straight? Coca-Cola would be high on the hangover list, too. It's black nectar at such times.
*Nick Frost, actor, 41*
I think we should amend that old saying about death and taxes to include food and eating. It really is that important. That's why the idea of comfort food, to me, is essentially a time machine back to when you were little. It's the best way to reconnect with our past, which is why it soothes us so.
Along with the Findus crispy pancakes that seemed to feature quite heavily, my mum used to make stroganoff, which was the first thing she taught me to cook. Now she's gone it's a way of connecting with her, through something we both loved. It tastes exactly the same as when she made it and so, for the time it takes me to eat it, I'm young again. I'm watching her slice onions. I have the same thing with Heinz tomato soup. Pie in a bowl with instant gravy, loads of white pepper and, depending on how low I feel, ketchup, is another favourite comfort meal. It has to be a small, shop-bought one, and I might also have a slice of white bread with butter to make a kind of pie sandwich near the end. I once told Simon Pegg we had pies in the freezer when we were a little worse for wear and he excitedly set off for the kitchen. When he opened the freezer it was completely empty and he turned around with a look on his face I'll never forget: shocked, then withering disbelief. Disbelief that I would, or could, lie about such a serious thing.
Nowadays, a bacon sandwich and a cheeky pint at lunch straightens everything out. Me and Mrs Frost have also been known to have a Whopper when it gets really bad. Pleasure shouldn't be guilty, though. The nearest I get to that is smuggling eight digestives up to bed to dunk sneakily in a nice cup of tea.
*Beth Ditto, singer, 32*
It's so difficult to narrow down the thing that's the most comforting, but if I have to, I'll say dill pickles. I feel like if there are pickles in the fridge, everything will be OK.
If we're talking homemade dishes, it has to be biscuits and gravy, southern-style. My mum makes the most incredible biscuits, but I can't make gravy as good as hers. There's even a chocolate gravy which very few people have heard of – it's a dish that only true southerners know. I make mine simple, with no herbs, just bacon scratch [the sticky bits left on the pan], milk, flour, salt and pepper. It's one of those dishes that seems so simple, but takes years of practice to perfect. Biscuits and gravy is a long process and when my mum, a nurse who worked a lot and was gone on weekends and holidays, took the time to make that for us seven kids, it made us feel taken care of. She'd always say, "Sick people don't take a day off," which meant we rarely had Christmas on the 25th or Thanksgiving on the actual day.
There's a reason traditions and celebrations centre on food – from fasting to eating a holiday meal till you bust at the seams while your uncle is sitting on the couch loosening his belt for an after-dinner nap, food is central to our sense of joy and comfort. Look at every episode of Seinfeld. They're always eating!
It's easy to forget that we're not bad people because we enjoy food, and so much importance is placed on rewarding people for denying themselves food. I'm fat, so people will have words about me talking about food, but that's normal. All my friends love eating and cooking for people, making each other feel part of something.
I have a "chosen family" Christmas at my house each year, taking in all the weird, orphaned adults whose parents live too far away or who have been denied a warm, giving atmosphere around the holidays. People bring dishes their parents or grandparents made.
When I'm travelling and need comfort I rely on Subway. Why? Because I can have as many American-style pickles as I want!
*Anthony Bourdain, chef, 57*
The first thing I crave when away from home is a good New York pastrami sandwich on rye. That is comfort for me. I also have an unholy affection for cheap macaroni cheese and spicy food when hungover, like leftover Szechuan food. Spicy scares the evil out.
If I were going to cook something for myself, it would be a Naples-style pasta with ragu or, as it's known in New Jersey Italian America, "Sunday gravy". It'd be oxtail, braciole, beef neck or shank slow-cooked in tomato sauce until falling off the bone. I've always been bitter about the fact that I'm not Italian American. They always seemed to have more fun and better arguments.
The idea of comfort food, to me, is the dish I need right now. Sometimes that's a hamburger, other times a bowl of pho that reminds me of happier, more romantic times. Or it could be soft-boiled eggs with crumbled, buttered toast, which is what my mother would make me when I was getting over a cold as a child – comfort food as a kid was directly related to maternal love; home, safety, security and the familiar – and is still perfect if I'm feeling blue. A baguette slathered with Normandy butter, dipped in hot chocolate, is another taste of childhood.
I absolutely believe in guilty pleasures. Mine include Popeyes' fried chicken, In-N-Out burgers, nasty sausage and pepper heroes from street fairs (guaranteed to cause gastrointestinal disease every time), deep-fried haggis with curry sauce, dirty-water hot dogs and obscenely expensive sushi.
I believe in the separation of food and sex, like church and state. While beautiful food can elicit similar physiological responses, I don't want food and sex in close proximity. There's nothing sexy about bloat or flatulence.
*Cornelia Parker, artist, 57*
Something like fish soup rates high on the comfort-food list for me. A bouillabaisse, or a monkfish stew – anything wet with fish in it, really. If I see something soupy and fishy like that on a menu, I have to have it. I went to Portugal at the beginning of the summer and we went to the same restaurant every night of the week, as you do, and I had monkfish stew four nights out of six. It was light, but incredibly comforting.
If I was cooking? It's difficult to say these days as my husband tends to monopolise the kitchen. Sometimes my young daughter and I will curl up on the sofa and watch Masterchef (we're obsessed with cookery programmes) while he cooks, which, to me, is about as comforting as it gets. He often cooks risottos, pastas, things like that, but as he's Texan we often get fajitas, which all hit the spot.
It's usually something starchy that you equate with comfort, isn't it? As a student I was very fond of making a potato casserole, sort of a moist potato lasagne with layers of thinly sliced spuds. It's based on a Scandinavian recipe where they add herring. When I'm let back in the kitchen again I'll look forward to pulling that one out the archives.
When I was a child we lived on a smallholding and grew vegetables, living in a very primitive way, but my mum would always overcook all these lovely veg in a pressure cooker to a pulp. We'd often have onions as a main, though, which must be where my undying love for them comes from.
A curious thing happened to me at school, though, in that all I wanted to eat was beetroot and red cabbage – pickled, boiled, you name it. We'd sit in tables of eight and I'd be the only one eating the salads. I still adore both things now, but these days I roast beetroot. There's something about that taste of the earth that brings huge comfort to me.
*Lulu Kennedy, fashion guru, 43*
Shepherd's pie with HP Sauce, chips and peas is my ultimate comfort food. My grandad always made it for me without fail. It was our special thing and I associate it with him and feeling super safe and happy. If I'm cooking, I do a good macaroni cheese with crispy bacon bits sprinkled over the top, served with a glass of red.
My never-fail hangover cure is pizza covered in Encona Caribbean chilli sauce and an ice-cold Red Stripe – and I remember vividly as a kid being desperate to be a grown-up so I could eat what I want when I want, and I still get a kick out of having ice cream for breakfast if I fancy it. On the subject of ice cream, my best friend's mum used to feed us Arctic roll as a treat and it seemed so exotic! I still crave it because I associate it with her and being happy.
When you travel with work you often need comfort and I take my own PG Tips with me whenever I go abroad. I get in a right mood about piss-weak teabags.
I love Mexican food, so if I was trying to combine an ultimate blow-out feast with comfort, I'd have be a huge heap of my favourite tacos al pastor and cochinita pibil imported fresh from Tulum, fresh chopped mangoes with lime, a nice bottle of sipping tequila, such as Patrón Gold, and a cigar. I'd also like a Mariachi band, but is that pushing my luck?
*Yotam Ottolenghi, chef, 44*
Comfort food is about eating the right food in the right place at the right time. It's when this connection between a dish and a certain context comes together that foods makes most sense and is comforting to me. In this way, any food can be comforting depending on the time and place, whether that's a can of smoked oysters for breakfast or a glass of red wine and pasta at the end of the day.
I don't think comfort foods have changed much for me really: a plate of warm hummus with crushed fava beans and a drizzle of oil, seared prawns with butter and lemon or a handful of Baci chocolates.
I always cook pasta or noodles for myself, but another real favourite is eggs with lots of herbs and whatever bits of cheese I've got lying around – feta is kind of essential. Runny eggs with melted cheese is the quickest, simplest solution for a pang of unexpected hunger. But my true comfort dish, I think, would be brown rice with miso vegetables. I use broccolini, carrot, mangetout, cucumber, mushrooms, and a black sesame dressing. It's hard to beat.
Food, for me, is synonymous with sharing and chatting, friends and family, and that's the case for any dish. And isn't true comfort in a relationship about being able to be free and "alone", even when you're not? I can't eat as much as I used to be able to so the stop button is easier to press these days, although I sometimes wonder whether it's right to enjoy Love Hearts and Fruit Mentos as much as I do.
*Azealia Banks, singer, 22*
Although my ultimate comfort food is loaded potato skins with bacon, I'll often make an amazing roast chicken with candied yams (sweet potatoes slow-baked with butter, brown sugar and marshmallows) and kale. It's a great combo. It reminds me of my family – my sister made roast chicken a lot for the family so it just sort of stuck with me. It's so soothing and nourishes different parts of you. Food nourishes your body and sharing these things with the people you love is really satisfying. It's great if you can cook a favourite dish for your boyfriend or girlfriend, or impress someone new with your ability to cook.
If we're talking guilty, comforting pleasures, mine has to be candy. Particularly Haribo Gummy Bears. As well as candy, I love steak. It's a guilty pleasure because red meat is so bad for you! When I was a kid I used to really love McDonald's. Who am I kidding, it's still great.
When I'm travelling and need to eat something familiar for comfort it has to be sushi. I love sushi. Sugarfish by Sushi Nozawa, which has branches across Los Angeles, is the best. In fact, one of their "Trust Me" boxes, with everything from tuna sashimi, halibut sushi and edamame to blue crab hand rolls, would be my death-row meal. That, and a bottle of sauvignon blanc. Reported by guardian.co.uk 8 hours ago.