Feed a cold: what to eat when you’re under the weather
Lurgy season is upon us. But at least it’s an excuse for some serious comfort eating.
For all the common cold is a miserable ordeal — and it really is, she says in a pathetic rasp from deep within Tissue Mountain — you have to admit it does have some redeeming features.
For one thing, the right to cancel all plans, have a very hot bath and go to bed at 8pm (if you have the luxury). For another, the excuse to go to Boots and do a lurgy haul, pretending for a few happy minutes that you can cure yourself by throwing £20 at shiny boxes of pills and sprays and balm tissues and three different flavours of Strepsil.
And then, there’s the food. Mmm, ill food. Call me perverse but when the first cold of the winter hits, there’s a small part of me that feels secretly excited — and that part is my stomach. In a similar way to PMS or an extravagant hangover, a classic winter cold is a gleeful chance to suspend normal service, crawl beneath a duvet and lavish yourself with whatever weird sustenance your body demands.
But unlike PMS or hangovers, which are most likely to lead me headfirst into the nearest bag of chewy triple chocolate cookies, a cold leaves you craving simple nourishment along with the calories. You want comfort and convenience, but also at least the vague suggestion of vitamins. It’s nostalgic food, back-to-basics food, food your mucus-addled brain dimly recalls having something to do with ‘building you up’ and ‘giving you your strength’. And everyone’s personal prescription of ill food is different.
For my mum, it’s always two soft-boiled eggs and Marmite soldiers. My boyfriend’s is a chicken jalfrezi ready meal and a packet of chocolate Hobnobs. Samantha’s in Sex and the City, you may remember, was Fanta and cough syrup blended up with ice. The beloved 1930s books of my childhood always had sick children being given great bowls of ‘hot bread and milk’, a dish I might have thought I’d imagined or misread were it not for Nigella (who else?) and her own blissful version.
My own list of perfect ill foods is greedy and extensive. Porridge, in a lake of honey. Baked beans on toast, under a blanket of molten cheese. Fish in butter sauce (the microwave kind), with mashed potato and perilous quantities of English mustard. Hot orange squash the way my parents used to make it for me, with added lemon juice, honey and ginger. Except these days I also add whisky.
There should be throat sweets — Halls Peach and Raspberry Soothers are the best; whether or not you have a sore throat is irrelevant. There ought to be satsumas, to chain-eat while wiping sticky fingers on your dressing gown. And there absolutely has to be soup.
My definitive ill soup is Heinz Cream of Tomato. Probably because it’s preserved forever in my memory as the soup of school sick days: eaten with Jacob’s cream crackers on a tray on the sofa, in front of Neighbours and Going For Gold. But of course, the official title of Get Better Soup belongs to chicken. As a kid I was puzzled by the way people on American TV shows would rhapsodise about the curative power of chicken soup — something I only knew as the wobbly greyish tower of Campbell’s Condensed, which held its form even after you’d dolloped it out of the can. Although even that had a certain charm.
But real ‘Jewish penicillin’, as the nickname goes, whether clear broth with matzah balls and noodles or the creamier kind with celery, leeks, carrots and barley, is definitely worth the hours of patient simmering. Though if you have a loving someone to do that part for you, all the better.
Then, there are southeast Asia’s many incredible slants on the punchy, restorative broth. Thai hot and sour tom yum, fragrant, coconutty Malaysian laksa, umami-rich Vietnamese pho, fiery Korean kimchi jjigae, Japanese ramen with beads of pork fat shimmering on the surface… delicious any time, but with a head full of cold they take on near-magical healing powers. Soups like that demand to be slurped until your eyes stream, until your sinuses whistle clear, until your cheeks are flushed and shiny from the effects of a chilli and lemongrass facial sauna. If you can drag yourself from your sickbed, there are few better ways to self-medicate than to go to a ramen bar, turn your back to the room, tie on a bib and steam yourself back to life again.
But if that’s beyond the realms of possibility or Deliveroo, you can always improvise. Call it a crime against authenticity, but a chicken stock cube, grated ginger, chilli flakes, spring onion, garlic, a packet of instant noodles and an egg makes a lunch fit for a germy queen. There’s science behind it all somewhere — ginger is a potent anti-inflammatory, garlic is antibacterial, chilli can shift congestion — but really the power lies less in fact and more in that feeling of temporary relief from your woolly, underwater bubble of a head. For as long as you’re spooning in each mouthful, you are both devoted nurse and grateful patient.
In a few days you’ll be better and there’ll be time for quinoa and avocado again then. But for now, that bowl of soup; that fishfinger sandwich; that tinned jam sponge with custard and a hot squash on a lap tray; they are the very best medicine in the world*.
*Notwithstanding actual medicine.
This article first appeared on The Pool in 2017.
