Today being a damp day and a good fall day for soup, I stopped by the local Ingles store after getting my flu shot and purchased some lean beef cubes. Whenever I think of good soup I remember when my husband and I first moved to Salisbury Maryland. Our first home there was an upstairs apartment of a retired fire chief and his wife. One day she brought me a big bowl of her home made beef soup. It had little pools of fat on the top and it was absolutely the best soup I had ever eaten !!
So whenever I think of really good soup I think of that day. Growing up my mother would invariably make vegetable soup on wash days. She used a meat base with ground beef. She also used some of her summer vegetables she had canned earlier in the year. It was always, corn, tomatoes and okra. As a child I mostly remember that she also baked two pies on each wash day. One was lemon and the other chocolate. Chocolate being my favorite I would inspect the meringue on top to see which was which. I have always marveled how she had time to make soup and two pies and on a busy day like washing for 10 people !
Another soup we had almost each week was pinto soup beans made with fatback for flavoring. And of course that called for cornbread made in a heavy black iron skillet, the undisputed pan for making crispy, moist buttermilk cornbread !!!! Yum. It was well known in our family that one of my older brothers was crazy about soup beans. His Yankee wife knew this too but would never cook this, saying she did not know how. She was more into elegant desserts. When my brother would be visiting any one of my older sisters they would always make sure that pinto bean soup was on the menu. Much to his delight.
In the 1950's when I lived in Baltimore Maryland my mother came to visit. The occasion was for her to stay with me during a difficult pregnancy. One day we went into the main part of the city to shop and had lunch in one of the big department stores. I ordered soup and noticed something in it that I could not identify so I asked the waitress what it was. She said turnips. I thought it was a good soup so I adopted the habit of adding one turnip to my soup, and this morning I bought one lovely purple top turnip to complete the assortment of vegetables for this soup today.
Something else I put in the soup for the first time today was dried tomatoes. My daughter had taken home some of the plum tomatoes from my garden and dried them. I had not thought to do that with any of the tomatoes I harvested. The plum type was perfect for drying as it had very little juice inside. I had put her dried tomatoes in the freezer to ensure that they stayed fresh, though dried. When I cut them today they were indeed dried and crisp and made a nice crunch when I cut them.
One soup I have not tried but really want to, is cheese soup. Way back in 1972 I was sick with pneumonia and felt just so bad I stayed in bed around the clock. A dear friend who was a Home Economics major made cheese soup for me, a big bowl of it. I was too sick to eat it and by the time I had recovered sufficiently to make use of it, it was no longer edible. What a loss. I know it must have been delicious as everything she cooked was top notch.
Simmering soup can give off an aroma to warm the soul. Books have been written about soup even for children. Stone Soup is a children's story written to highlight cooperation. I have not read it for ages. But it could apply to a lot of things. One that comes to mind is the popular potluck dinner. We do this each month at our church. A lot of good recipes are exchanged after these dinners. This past year the ladies of our church published their second cookbook. We had numerous meetings about this publication. A lot of the recipes from the original church cookbook were included. I made this past Christmas my cookbook year as I bought them for family and friends far and wide. I used one of the recipes yesterday which had been in the old book. It called for a procedure which was new to me, chocolate melted with paraffin for dipping a ball of nuts and fruit. The results were quite pleasing. The books will be on sale at a fall festival nearby. The church ladies each made something from the cookbook and samples will be given out to visitors to our booth. Most cooks like to share their recipes and their favorite foods as well. It is a pleasant way to nurture friendships. Perhaps I will share this soup I am cooking today with one of my neighbors. She may not be planning on soup tonight and it may just warm her spirits.
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