Crispy Chicken, Crunchy Sprouts, and Supercharged Mash

Trying times call for comfort food and flavors big enough to blast through the political brain fog and make a sensory impact.

As a progressive living in Los Angeles, the past week has been … interesting. We’ve gone from the highest highs (my 3-year-old getting BIG psyched about mail-in ballots) to the lowest lows (results are … not what our household was hoping they would be so far), and our emotions are all over the place.

The only solution, as far as I can see? Cooking the pain away. Trying times call for comfort food and flavors big enough to blast through the political brain fog and make a sensory impact.

Wednesday night, that looked like the classic American comfort food pairing of chicken, mashed potatoes, and brussels sprouts with the flavor cranked all the way up to eleven.

Elections and emotions

I have to admit that I’m still a little traumatized by what happened with Hillary Clinton in 2016. I remember that night like it was yesterday, how my roommates and I started out the evening with snacks on the couch, acting excited and trying to ignore the pit in my stomach, going to bed early when those early results started to confirm my hunch that bad news was coming. Since then, I’ve kind of lost the zest for the whole elections-as-sport thing. It just all feels a bit too important, and, honestly, a bit too hopeless sometimes.

But my 3-year-old doesn’t know any of that. For him, elections mean impassioned dinner table speeches from my history teacher husband, exciting and colorful mailers that he gets to deposit directly into the recycling bin, and, on election night, the thrilling task of being a “voter guy,” dropping our ballots into the local mail in a collection box. Of course we let him wear both of our household “I voted” stickers. It was all a little bit nice, I have to admit. But then the results started trickling in and reader, all I can say is yikes.

Finding comfort at the stove

I try not to get too fixated on early results, knowing that there are many votes still to be counted, likely including my own. But gang, I have to admit that I don’t exactly feel encouraged by seeing how much support Spencer Pratt of all people is getting at this stage in the game. A man I first encountered peripherally in my adolescence, famous mostly for being a bad boyfriend, is getting taken seriously in my home town’s political arena. It doesn’t feel super great.

But in the kitchen, I don’t have to think about any of this. I can feel in control. My mom used to talk about how she liked cooking for its capacity to return her to her body, something I didn’t understand — children generally don’t understand these things. But now I get it. We spend so much time in our heads, the numinous spaces of digital worlds, that there’s something genuinely refreshing about the non-negotiable physicality of life at the stove.

When so much of the world feels chaotic, a recipe is the rare thing that does exactly what you expect it to. You control the heat. You control the outcome. Dinner comes together because you willed it to do so.

Flavors as medicine

Suffering alone, I might opt for a gigantic plate of simple carbs in times like these — think spaghetti in spicy tomato sauce, or a bowl of fluffy white rice with an egg whisked through. But I have children to feed and a husband in front of whom I try to appear as a functional adult. It has to be a little more complex than that.

Chicken and mashed potatoes is such a comfort food classic that it seemed like an obvious mood, but I needed something to level it up, make me really engage and pay attention. Something deeply nourishing for body and soul. So the mash is fortified with chopped greens, the crispy sprouts gilded with crispier parmesan cheese. The chicken is finished in a glossy butter sauce, bright with fresh and preserved lemons.

It always feels good to return to our culinary roots. But maybe more important than any of that is that this is a reimagining of American comfort food. There’s a tenderness, and maybe even a gentle kind of irony, in turning to it now. This is still my country and my kitchen and my kid, and dinner still has to happen. So let’s make it happen in style.

Emily Beyda’s writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Built, Refinery29, Smartmouth, Fodors, the Thrillist, the Austin Chronicle, and more. Her novel, “The Body Double,” was published in 2021.

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