Food works, it really does. It delivers generous quantities of support to the human psyche in times of trouble, and the effect is immediate. Eating for comfort works so well, in fact, that it's easy to overdose; hence the bad reputation that has grown up around this ancient and excellent cure-all. But cooking for comfort--there's a prescription nobody has ever abused. So with the economy in a shambles, and the future unknown but promising to be unpleasant, I started wondering what it must have been like to cook during the Great Depression. Not that we're reliving the 1930s yet, but we're certainly experiencing the same weather: massed clouds of uncertainty, and a daily rain of bad news. No matter what homemakers were putting on the table 70 years ago, it was fear cuisine--and everyone was an expert.
