by Leslie Pietrzyk

While I was coming of age in the 80s, Tab was comfort food. The pink can of diet soda was practically an accessory for the girls on my Midwestern university campus. Even if you weren’t in a sorority, you wanted to give the impression that you could be, that you were the one who sniffed, no thanks, not them. It was comforting that one pink can allowed a girl like me to appear to fit in. I liked the taste, sort of, that chemical cross of slippery sweetness rippling bitter after-rings. Drinking Tab was pleasure and pain both, as was my coming of age in this Midwestern college.

I’ve been pondering what I ate in the 1980s because my new novel Silver Girl takes place then. Set outside Chicago, at a university similar to my alma mater, the book explores a complicated and destructive friendship between two girls, one affluent, one working class. Each girl is withholding secrets from each other and from herself. The writing challenge for a campus novel is the risk of feeling static, since—generalizing!—college students spend the bulk of time in classes, the library, or parties; or else they’re eating. I focused there, using food to illustrate the growing discomfort my unnamed narrator, the working class girl, feels toward her friend Jess and this prickly environment fraught with unwritten rules.

It was a revelation to realize now that the comfort food back then wasn’t especially comforting. For example, macaroni and cheese might top anyone’s list of ultimate American comfort food. I’m sure plenty of 1980s home cooks used real cheddar,* following a treasured recipe from grandma, filling a Pyrex dish with a molten, cheesy, goo of ecstasy. Perhaps that’s a given in Southern culture (though dare I breathe the word “Velveeta”?). But for the Midwesterners I knew, macaroni and cheese came in a blue box with the word KRAFT stamped on it. My sister and I loved the silver packet of powdery “cheese.” Preparing Kraft was “cooking” since we added milk (skim at our house) and butter (margarine at about anyone’s house). We were comforted because this was a dish we could make alone for summer lunch when our parents were off at work. We were 10 and 6 and no one considered it dangerous for two girls to boil water in a pot on the stove.

Maybe this quick sketch suggests how and why many of us easing from childhood to adulthood during the Reagan years ended up confused by the idea of food as comfort. We had grown up with food prep that was supposed to be tidy, efficient, and quick-quick-quick. Potatoes came dried in a box, as hard as poker chips, with a choice of au gratin or sour cream and onion. Rip open the box and the seasoning packet, pour into a pan, add water and bake.
TV dinners in their compartmentalized aluminum tray meant foods never touched. I liked Salisbury steak, complemented by mashed potatoes, a forgettable carrot/pea mix, and if my mother bought the good brand, a tiny square brownie to dig out with two fingers and eat first. Mrs. Grass chicken noodle soup was another blue box: a tangle of stiff, skinny noodles, a cellophane packet of pulsatingly yellow seasoning and the “golden nugget,” a knuckle-sized globule of chemically-hardened chicken fat. My sister and I fought to be the one dropping it into the boiling water. Five minutes, and soup was on. Can food that’s intended to be quick also comfort? Or do we simply find comfort wherever we can, especially in hard spaces? I mean, I’m drooling right now to think of Mrs. Grass soup, which is not sold at my grocery store, but which still exists, though the golden nugget got ditched.

Recently, I posted a casual question in a Facebook group for serious cooks and foodies: What comfort foods do you remember from the 1980s? The ages of those who answered ranged from being children in the 80s to college students, and their litany of foods got my head bobbing hell yes!, even as my eyebrows ratcheted up in shock. These foodies, many of them current or retired professional chefs, were rhapsodizing over my favorites, like Chef Boyardee, Pringles, Hostess Hohos, Swanson single-serving pot pies, Stove Top Stuffing, Steak-Umms, Stouffer’s French Bread pizza, Cap’N Crunch, and Bagel Bites. Sure, there were outliers from a rich food culture and references to lovingly-composed care packages from moms and grandmas. But mostly, the list was boxes and cans, highly processed food.

People eat these items today. In twenty years, today’s children may be thrilling to memories of Kraft mac and cheese. And packaging shelf-stable “Singapore street noodle curry” in microwaveable plastic suggests flavor sophistication but is still all about chemicals and quick-quick-quick. Maybe nothing has changed: when it comes to cooking at home, ease and efficiency trump all.

In my Midwest, people tended to be stoic, unwilling to make a fuss. The college I (and my novel’s narrator) rather haphazardly ended up at was a hard place, filled with students who were so much smarter, with so much more money and much cuter sweaters. Students bragged about how stressed out they were, and the favored adjective was “intense.” This wasn’t a time where parents rushed in to fix up things. Besides, parents were busy brooding about Reagan—and his revolution—now abruptly in power. Such a nervous time, an “intense” time (not unlike now). Preppies were dueling with New Wave punks. Women wore big shoulder pads, muscling deeper into the work world. I’d never written a research paper, let alone a 10-page paper, which turned out to mean a 10-page paper about Henry James with footnotes that had to be typed. Reagan, Reagan, Reagan. Thatcher, Thatcher, Thatcher. The endless sentences of Henry James. A thousand cans of Tab couldn’t make me belong.

My penny-pinching narrator in Silver Girl is awed that Jess’s dad orders bleu cheese salad dressing, which costs twenty-five cents extra, as it did back then. At this special dinner she is excited to order fried shrimp, self-conscious that it’s the second most expensive item on the menu. Jess is fine with only salad, oil-and-vinegar on the side, because eating lightly is different when it’s a choice. The meal that gets one character through an especially rough day is ice cream followed by salty French fries followed by a secret purge in the bathroom. Bagels come frozen. Ramen noodles are on sale, 5 packs for a dollar. The comfort of pizza transcends time and space and there’s a delicious moment when the narrator has enough money to afford the pizza and to tip for delivery. Throughout, lurks the Tylenol murderer, who popped open capsules of Tylenol, inserted cyanide, and replaced the bottles on drugstore shelves. Seven people died, and this event brought about protective packaging. Clearly, in my remembered world, what was eaten was a source of anxiety, not of comfort. What was eaten had a cost.

Comfort is not soft, it’s what is familiar, whether that’s processed food or sauce a grandmother stirred for 8 hours over the stove. The girls on campus were comforted to see those pink Tab cans. Sure, a factory assembly line plopped golden nuggets into an endless procession of blue boxes, but in my hand, it was a smooth talisman of soup to come in five minutes. We would get through whatever there was to get through, and no, no one needed to make a bother just for us. If it happened to be the TV dinner with the tiny brownie, great. If not, well, we’ll pick out the carrot cubes and leave the peas and fill up later with handfuls of Cap’n Crunch, the dry cereal roughing the roof of our mouths almost to the point of blood. That’s how life was, we figured then: not something to sink comfortably into. How important to learn that early on.

Then I left that school and left the Midwest, and finally I got my own kitchen and selected my own groceries. I cooked what I wanted, instead of eating what there was. I found nourishment and friends who cooked, and we cooked real food, food that soothed. I remember the Silver Palate’s spaghetti sauce, brie, quiche, guacamole, and above all, spinach dip in a bread bowl, which I first ate in a friend’s apartment in Glendale, Arizona, while drinking Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers. So clever to serve the dip in a hollowed-out bread round (though Midwestern me noted, one less bowl to wash). The dip’s glossy opulence transformed a bitter block of frozen spinach into an indulgence. I could make this dip for myself, I suddenly realized, and I could eat it every day for the rest of my life. Comfort could be a choice. My friend wrote out the recipe on a piece of paper. Food is complicated, yet it’s also simple.
You bet this recipe** contains packaged soup mix. That’s the 80s.

*Simple-But-Satisfying Macaroni and Cheese 
*Occasionally my mother made us a gooey, cheesey mass of real macaroni and cheese, similar to this recipe. Add some pinches of cayenne and dry mustard for pop. Instead of serving off the stove, dump it into a casserole dish and top either with more cheese or buttery (real) bread crumbs and bake for 15-20 minutes in a 350 degree oven. Oh, and don’t use bagged cheese. Grate your own!

**1980s Spinach Dip
This recipe is so simple that I can’t believe it’s actually a recipe. Probably the hardest part is hollowing out a bread round; if you do that neatly, you can use those pieces of bread as dip vehicles. Also, don’t even think about using reduced fat sour cream! (Okay, of course you can…but really?) And I would hardly call the water chestnuts optional: they give the dip crunch and that certain 80s flair.

Leslie Pietrzyk’s new book, Silver Girl, was called “a profound, mesmerizing, and disturbing novel” in a starred review by Publishers Weekly and will be out from Unnamed Press on February 27, 2018. This Angel On My Chest, her collection of unconventionally-linked short stories, won the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. More information: www.lesliepietrzyk.com Twitter: @lesliepwriter Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/lesliepietrzykwriter/

Purchase “Silver Girl” here.