The grilled cheese sandwich, especially with a bowl of tomato soup, is classic suburban-America comfort food. Eating one for dinner every once in a while reminds us of our culinary innocence, a time before we worried about trans-fats and low-carb diets and the excesses of agribusiness; back when the gooey, salty, unnaturally orange warmth hiding between two slices of toast just felt like home.

But let's face it, we're grownups now, and eating grilled cheese for dinner two nights in a row is just plain ghetto.

This was my dilemma as I walked home from work last night, realizing that the bareness of my fridge might compel me to cross that line between nostalgia and squalor. If I was going to preserve the charm of last night's trip down memory lane, I had to get some more groceries.

I stopped into Citarella, a block and a half from my apartment, on the way home, trying to maintain my recent health kick with a good dose of fresh fish. But as I looked over the variety of aquatic life glistening on beds of chipped ice, I just couldn't get excited. Citarella may have the freshest stock of any retail fishmonger in the city, but sometimes that's just not enough. There's something about fresh fish that feels insubstantial, transient, groundless. Even a hot fish dish can sometimes leave you feeling cold, like a quick dip in the ocean followed by a long, slow drying off in the open air. And with winter coming, food that sticks with you, lingering long after the meal is over, is one of the best ways to keep warm.

But who has time to braise lamb shanks or throw together a pot roast in the middle of the week? Certainly not me. So passing over the fish and meat counters at Citarella, I decided to head upstairs and wait for inspiration to strike. And there they were, like ingots of iron and antique brass stacked up in a deli case: smoked fish. Trout, chubbs, whitefish, salmon, sturgeon. The evanescence of the sea fixed in a matrix of salt and woodsmoke; preserved, permanent, warm.

I picked out a whole trout and a whole chubb, some crème fraîche, a shallot, and a jar of capers. At home, I assembled the lot on thick toasted slices of the hearty brown bread I used for my grilled cheese sandwich the night before. Long after the meal was over, hints of brine and campfires remained on my lips, my fingertips. Fish that lingers. A different kind of comfort food.