Hungry for Comfort: The Pleasures of Home Cooking

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

Comfort food, according to Murray, is food that makes you feel good.
Chances are it also comes with a touch of nostalgia, and more likely
than not it is the product of slow cooking. Definitely it is homemade.

With a collection of over 180 recipes, there’s room to share comfort
foods from the author’s rural Ontario roots as well as from European
and Maritime traditions. This is Murray’s ninth published cookbook and
the characteristics of a seasoned pro are evident in the imaginative
chapter groupings, enticing introductory notes that “sell” each
recipe, well-presented ingredients lists in both imperial and metric,
and clear methods.

The work has two sections: recipes by food type (appetizers, soups,
breads, entrées, side dishes, desserts) and by menu. The menu section
includes recipes for 12 different situations, ranging from a farmers’
market supper and a Friday night pizza party to a company breakfast, a
Christmas Eve dinner, and a Halloween bash.

The recipes are cozy and comfortable, with a feeling for the familiar.
Traditional dishes such as chicken noodle soup, homemade caramel
popcorn, angel biscuits, meat loaf, and chocolate cake mix with the more
adventuresome, generating a nice synergy. There’s comfort in simply
reading the recipes.

Hungry for Comfort is a Canadian collection that will appeal to modern
families, giving, with a minimum of effort, results that are physically
and psychologically satisfying. The absence of nutritional analysis for
the recipes is surprising in a work of this overall quality.