I then divert my self with my two sweete children, think of all my kind friends, and take a dish of chocolate, which I find the greatest cordiall and reviveing in the world.

-Anne Dormer, c.1690

Western, especially North American, culture in particular has forged long-lasting stereotypical associations between (a) women and chocolate (b) chocolate and medicine (c) children and sweets.

The use and consumption of cacao has an ancient, ancient past in its Mesoamerican home. In terms of colonialist chroniclers' awareness, they refer initially to "chocolate" as a drink that the Mexica believed was a stimulant in battle and an aphrodesiac--so, more associated with men than women.

But by 1590, Jose de Acosta could write:

It disgusts those who are not used to it, for it has a foam on top, or a scum-like bubbling...It is a valued drink, which the Indians offer to the lords who come or pass through their land. And the Spanish men, and even more the Spanish women, are addicted to the black chocolate.

Around this time, too, other priests rail against women in Mexico who are sneaking cups of chocolate into Mass with them.

So you see that while in actuality the link is between nobility/wealth and chocolate, it's framed as one between women and chocolate. The stereotype despite consumption by women and men persists further into the early modern era and back to Europe.

In 1663, the archbishop of Prague wrote:

Those meddlesome women, how gladly they have hunted down all the stores [of the cardinal's chocolate] and quite helped themselves.

There were two problems, though: first, chocolate remained a prestige for the nobility (hence the archbishop of Prague receiving stores of chocolate).

Second, and very relevant for our purposes here, chocolate in early modern Europe was an important medicine. There was a strong cultural link between chocolate and feeling better, along with the stereotype of women loving chocolate. Scholars who've worked with the letters of Anne Dormer, quoted above, have rooted her turn to chocolate in this idea.

Male moralists in the later 19th century, though, worked to strengthen the association between women and chocolate in kind of a sideways fashion. They turned chocolate and other sweet things into "dainty" and "childlike" treats--the proper food for children...and for their mothers. Certainly not for men! In World War I, in fact, it took major campaigns to get American troops in Europe to consume the quick, easy energy of candy, because the food had such strong feminine associations.

Gender continues to play a strong role in people's actual choice of comfort food--and, perhaps, an even stronger one in stereotypes. Wansink and Sangermann (2000) found in one survey that 74% of women listed ice cream as one of their top three comfort foods, and 69% listed chocolate. Men included soup, and for some reason "pizza or pasta" counted together.

W&S suggested that this meant women preferred prepackaged foods; men preferred foods that other people prepared for them. (I'm very sure that the majority of pizza and soup consumed today is homemade, aren't you?)

Charles Spence (2017) was more direct, drawing out the pop psych:

Notice the place of hot main meals as comfort food for men, or as one newspaper headline put it: "Women like sugar, men like meat."

Yes, men included soup in their top three, and pizza and pasta if counted together.

...And 77% of them said ice cream. Ice cream, my favorite homemade hot food.

The three psychologists' insistence on disregarding the actual evidence for stereotypes suggests there is a lot more research to be done on the role of stereotypes and gender roles with comfort foods.