Stewing in Throngs of Tumultuous Tourists

It is no secret that I adore food that comforts. I am not referring to spray cheese, triple decker burgers, chips or ice cream. When I use the term comfort food, I refer to flavour, texture, history (not just in the worldly sense, but your history as an individual with personal experiences regardless of how old you are), food that conjures up a sense of tradition (again, how ever long-established that may be for you) and familiarity (in a good way!), taking you to that warm safe cosy place in your subconscious where your senses breathe a welcome sigh of relief and you forget all the troubles of the day for the time being. That is what I feel comfort food is, a private culinary refuge through the doors of your taste buds and olfactory senses. 

For me, nothing can get more comforting than a good hearty stew. The textures of the individual components of each stew can vary from carrots with a smooth bite, soft fluffy chunks of potato, tender juicy meat, soft succulent cabbage to the fluid broth that cradles everything in its warm embrace. But the beauty of a slow cooked stew is that all theses textures meld together in one pot within a single broth so that the once isolated flavours and textures are forever bound together in a harmonious household of gastronomic wonder. They may maintain their unique characteristics but they have joined hands in a united accord to stand together for the greater good of the stew. 

This particular encounter came on a day out with my parents in London. We had been walking for a while in central London and were caught in the overflowing throngs of the city's omnipresent tourists. We needed an escape, fast. The next restaurant in our sight was a Garfunkel's. We thought. We dove in. The horror. Every table was packed with cameras, shopping bags, maps, water bottles and foreign multi-accented conversation. Tourists had already invaded the diner. But we weathered the unrelenting xeno-storm and wedged ourselves into a tiny table in front of a till. I needed a way out. One look at the menu and I knew I had one. Irish stew. Overpriced? Yes. Quality? Not that great. But it still did the job. The lamb was tender but lacked the depth of flavour a quality piece of meat carries with it. The pear barley provided the sustenance I required to fight of the flocks of foreigners (I know, I'm not an Anglo-Saxon but I don't consider myself a tourist in the typical sense when I am in the UK). Pearl barley is so fun to eat. Soft and slippery but with an oat-like bite and substantial density like an oversized grain of rice. Also, even though it is great as soaking up other flavours, it never loses its own fragrance of sweet grain. Despite being mass produced from a run of the mill family restaurant chain, the stew was still  a stew, hearty through and through, delivering the smoky delicious depth that one should always encounter when diving into a bowl of satisfying stew.