At first thought, one might not con­ceive of com­fort food as some­thing that requires a cook­book. The very essence of com­fort food — its abil­i­ty to evoke a sense of home and ease — does­n’t seem to demand a recipe, nor does it usu­al­ly come with an elab­o­rate gro­cery list. Often­times the recipes we most asso­ciate with com­fort are those that have been passed down to us by fam­i­ly mem­bers. So, you might won­der: why seek out Ottolenghi Com­fort, the lat­est cook­book by Yotam Ottolenghi and his tal­ent­ed team of collaborators?

While you might not find an exact match for your grandmother’s noo­dle kugel, what Com­fort offers is some­thing equal­ly valu­able: a sen­si­tive, globe-span­ning col­lec­tion of recipes sure to warm your bel­ly and soul. These dish­es are the authors’ own per­son­al favorites, but they also tap into uni­ver­sal feel­ings of warmth and nostalgia.

Yotam Ottolenghi, Helen Goh, Ver­e­na Lochmuller, and Tara Wigley invite read­ers to wel­come new com­fort foods into their kitchens. In their view, com­fort food is both nos­tal­gic and nov­el. Their cook­book exists in that sweet spot, offer­ing some recipes that will be famil­iar to Jew­ish Amer­i­can read­ers, like mat­zo ball soup, bourekas, and egg­plant-baked pas­ta, and oth­ers that may be less famil­iar, such as a lemon­grass-and-tuna galan­gal cur­ry — an excit­ing take on canned tuna, inspired by a recipe passed down from the moth­er of one of Helen Goh’s Indone­sian coworkers.

What makes the book so com­pelling is its cel­e­bra­tion of the diverse array of recipes that come to people’s minds when they hear ​“com­fort food.” Some recipes, like Lochmuller’s dis­tinct­ly Scot­tish cheese-and-onion but­ter­ies (think: lam­i­nat­ed dough with a bur­nished ched­dar crust), come from child­hood mem­o­ries of fam­i­ly camp­ing trips. Oth­ers are drawn from more recent expe­ri­ences: a dish tast­ed at a friend’s New Year’s par­ty, for exam­ple, or a hum­mus imbued with the fla­vors of South­ern France, devel­oped while one of the authors lived there. Com­fort encour­ages us to expand our culi­nary hori­zons and embrace fla­vors that could become just as cher­ished as those we grew up with.

At its heart, this is a book about migra­tion, iden­ti­ty, cul­ture, and the sto­ries that shape our rela­tion­ships with food. These themes will res­onate deeply with Jew­ish read­ers. Ottolenghi Com­fort, then, is not just a col­lec­tion of recipes, but a touch­ing, inti­mate explo­ration of the ways in which food con­nects us to our his­to­ries and one another.