COMFORT FOODS // Little Doorways – Elin Morris

Food was my grandmother’s love language. She was from Malaysia, where good food is priority number one. Achi—the Sinhalese word for grandmother and what we called her—met my Welsh grandad during the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s, where he was serving in the British police force. They got married and settled down in Cardiff, before he died relatively young.

COMFORT FOODS // Sik Fan – Kimi Canete

In my earliest memories, I am eating Chinese food. My great-aunt’s house in the suburbs outside Boston is split-level and her mother, my great-grandmother, lives in the lower level. You enter through the front door onto a landing between the two halves of the house, and if you walk downstairs, her kitchen will be directly in front of you.

COMFORT FOODS // Gulyás – Liam Skillen

I look at a photo of my Hungarian grandfather and his compatriots in Carr Bank Park, posing by the flowerbeds on Woodhouse Road, and know it is possible to belong to more than a single place. 

COMFORT FOODS // Ends and Pieces – Lisa Ochoa

You’ve probably never noticed them. Their red and white box usually sits well below their thick-cut, smoked, and maple-flavored cousins in their clear ‘look at me!’ packaging. Or, sometimes, Ends and Pieces aren’t displayed at all, and you have to ask the butcher for them. Because mind you, they are the ends and pieces, the leftovers, the scraps. Who would want them?

My mom, that’s who.

COMFORT FOODS // Dissecting the Heart of Mandu – J.A. Pak

Dissecting the Heart of Mandu The Chinese, Mongolians, Japanese, and now the Americans and Europeans are in my food, but are the Turkic nomads there as well? Intriguing and exciting. A mandu (만두) is a Korean dumpling. A savory dumpling with a filling of meat. It’s usually boiled but it can also be steamed, pan-fried,…