comfort eating

The Irish Times 18 November 2023

This book, the second memoir from restaurant critic Grace Dent, will make you hungry. Dent is both a Guardian columnist and a Masterchef judge. But like many of the best food writers – Nigella Lawson is another – she did not start her career writing about food. Dent has written 11 novels for young adults and had a much-missed column called World of Lather about soap operas first. 

This memoir shares its name with the podcast on which she interviews celebrities about the snacks they eat behind closed doors. From Siobhán McSweeney and her snack of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk with cheese and onion Taytos and a swig of Guinness to Stephen Fry with his tinned fish, it is a revelatory and intimate podcast. The book is far cosier than her previous memoir, Hungry (2020), which was a surprisingly profound account of her life so far – as she says, it reflected on both “Findus Crispy Pancakes and Alzheimer’s disease”. 

There is no one who writes better about a 1980s childhood (“those days with no sun block, no phone”) and I can think of few more succinct descriptions of not being middle class than “our house was pebble dashed, we all had silver fillings”. She also writes movingly about caring for her dying mother, “a stubborn Cumberland woman who had more comebacks than Lazarus” and whose idea of a treat was white toast with cheap marmalade. 

I treasured her assertion that no comfort food is purely good or bad for you but that “They exist. Vividly.” This might be the sanest thing anyone has ever written about eating for pleasure. 

She brilliantly describes chocolate concrete – a rough-and-ready school dinner take on chocolate brownies from her childhood – as needing to be made with margarine because if it is made with butter, “it’ll still be delicious, but it will taste a bit like it’s tried to dress up nicely for a court appearance”. 

Unfortunately, the later sections have a slightly cobbled-together feel and even include some “recipes” from the podcast such as Aisling Bea’s take on potato waffles with spaghetti hoops. This is padding and is rescued by the fact that Dent has funny bones and will make you laugh and think at almost every turn. 

This review originally appeared in The Irish Times