Savor Scout › What to eat › What to eat when you have a cold
What to eat when you have a cold
The specific problem with eating while congested is that most of what you call taste is smell, and yours has gone. Food is not bland because the kitchen under-seasoned it. It is bland because you are only getting salt, sweet, sour, bitter and heat — and those are the five things worth building the order around.
Which is genuinely useful information, because it tells you what to order. Chilli heat is not a taste at all — it is a pain response, and it works perfectly well when your nose does not. So does sour. So does salt. A bowl of tom yum, a hot and sour soup, a proper pho with plenty of lime and chilli, a bowl of congee with pickles: these all land when a subtly seasoned dish registers as warm nothing.
The other half is steam and liquid, which is the reason every culture's sick-day food is a soup. Nobody needs to make a health claim about it for it to be true that a bowl of hot broth is pleasant to sit over when you feel terrible, and that a sandwich is not.
The practical constraint is that you probably should not be in a restaurant. This is the one situation on this site where delivery or collection is the right answer, and it is worth choosing a restaurant on the basis that soup travels well — which it does, far better than anything fried.
What to order:
- Hot, sour and spicy — Tom yum, hot and sour soup, pho with extra lime and chilli, sinigang, menudo. These work through channels that congestion does not block.
- Broth over solids — Easy to eat with no appetite, and pleasant to hold.
- Ginger, garlic, lime, chilli, black pepper — Strong, simple flavours that do not rely on aroma to register.
- Congee, jook or any rice porridge — Mild, warm, and requires nothing of you. The one exception to the go-bold rule, for when even chewing is unappealing.
- Something that travels — Soup in a sealed container survives a delivery ride. Anything crisp does not.
Try this search
Savor Scout takes a sentence rather than a category, so the criteria above can go straight into the box. For this, something like “hot and sour soup, delivery or pickup, open now” works — it reads menus and reviews for those specific things and comes back with one place and the reasons it picked it.
Search “hot and sour soup, delivery or pickup, open now” →
What usually goes wrong
Anything delicate or expensive — you will not taste it and the money is wasted. Anything fried, which arrives soft. And do not go and sit in a restaurant with a streaming cold; get it to go.
What to eat
Worth considering here: pho, soup, Thai food, Chinese food, ramen.
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