Comfort Eating

Pick it up: If you want to read a heartwarming book about the power of food to cheer and comfort us, to evoke memory and nostalgia and to give us a lift when things get difficult, if you want to read an account of a few honest conversations about food, life, love and everything in between.

Grace Dent is a restaurant critic for The Guardian, and a judge on BBC's MasterChef UK. This book, as the title suggests, is about the foods that we turn to at the end of a long day, meals that we eat by ourselves when we're in need of a bit of lifting up, foods that we loved eating as children, the first meals that we made for ourselves as adults-on-a-budget, meals that we can have again and again.

Such meals often tend to involve bread, potatoes, pasta, cheese, butter, bacon, chocolate, ice-cream...things that we've been told are bad for us, and so qualify as “guilty” pleasures. But sometimes, that is exactly what we need. At the end of a long and stressful day, a salad of greens and lean chicken simply will not satisfy.

Comfort Eating began as a podcast in 2021, and is still on air. In each episode, Grace Dent invites a celebrity to her home. They sit in her kitchen and discuss their lives in the context of food, cooking and cuisine. They talk about their favourite comfort foods and the sometimes strange but satisfying meals that they throw together when they’re eating alone. The podcast is a collection of warm, chatty, cheerful, heart-warming, funny, uplifting, and often deeply personal conversations.

Comfort Eating, the book, features the best of these conversations.