Soup Bliss and the Forces Beyond My Control Working Against Me
Happy New Year!
Dear Reader,
Making soup usually begins with an onion, finely diced and softening in a little oil on the bottom of a large pot. But not always.
When I learned to make it, I was sixteen years old and had just started working on the buffet at the Eat n’ Park in Medina, Ohio. The buffet kitchen was in the back of the restaurant, right by the smoking section, and we had to make all the salads and food we served, including the soup. I worked nights and weekends around my high school schedule. And I was working my first of many Saturday mornings with a Korean woman named Kim.
Kim was probably in her forties, close to the age I am now, but I don’t know for sure because, when I was in high school, I suffered from complete self-absorption and social awkwardness. As a result, I considered everyone twenty and up: old. I can only imagine how difficult it was for Kim to work with a person like me. Anyway, I remember some of my other high school-aged coworkers (many of whom suffered from similar afflictions) telling me that she wasn’t fun to work with or that she was mean. It was true that Kim said little, and what she did say, because English wasn’t her first language, sounded clipped and short. But I didn’t talk much that early in the morning either and, at least from my warped teen perspective, we worked pretty well together—falling into a pattern of who did what, taking turns for cigarette breaks, and saying only what needed to be said.
That first morning, after we’d set up the breakfast buffet and made it through the initial rush of guests, Kim looked at me and said pointedly, “You, make soup.”
I had never made soup before—in real life or at work. No one at Eat n’ Park had trained me on that yet. And so Kim took down the binder of buffet recipes, showed me where the pots were kept, and left me to it.
We made three kinds of soup every day. Chili daily, with what I still consider to be the perfect chili recipe. I’ve since shrunk it down for domestic use and incorporated it into my soul. And then two others that differed each day on a regular weekly schedule. Wednesdays and Sundays we made potato soup, which I still remember because it was the most popular. Sometimes it felt like we could not keep that potato soup pot on the salad bar full. I think—and it’s been almost thirty years, so I could be wrong—chicken noodle and cream of broccoli were on Saturday.
When I didn’t know what to do or needed help finding an ingredient, Kim showed me. And after that first time, every Saturday morning, once the breakfast bar was set up, I made soup.
The only real trick to making soup is getting each ingredient’s texture right at the end. Eat n’ Park’s slow-cooking method of cooking it in double boilers, like making it in a crockpot, doesn’t require starting with a diced onion in oil. You don’t need to worry about the order in which you add ingredients to the pot. The process had been simplified to something even a high school student could do. The bases of all the cream soups, for example, came frozen in blocks. I only had to add water and cream to those. For the potato soup, we used the same pre-diced and peeled potatoes that the other kitchen used to make home fries. The key ingredient in the chili was something we called POC, which, outside of the Eat n’ Park vernacular, was a combination of diced peppers, onions, and celery that came in big plastic bags. And the house chili seasoning, which I’ve only been able to substitute, came in premixed and measured bags. The pots were so big and heavy when they were full that Kim and I had to work together to lift the inner pot and check the water level in the lower one so the soup wouldn’t burn. This was in 1996; I have no idea how they do it now.
For that hour or so it took me to make the soup, I didn’t have to rush or worry about what the restaurant guests were doing to the buffet because Kim was keeping an eye on it. And we both liked to try a cup before serving it on the buffet.
From these formative culinary experiences, soup has become my favorite food to make and eat. In any restaurant, the first thing I need to find out before deciding what to order is the soup du jour. And I make it at home more than I make anything else. Cooking is not my favorite thing to do, but making soup has always been a little different.
I love soup for all the reasons anyone does. It’s cheap and warm and healthy. There are countless varieties, and you can make it out of simple and widely available ingredients. Some soups can be made with a few canned ingredients. Others can be made with whatever you have on hand. You can make it a meal with salad and bread or crackers or tortilla chips. Making soup requires no special equipment, but if you have a blender, it unlocks all the pureed varieties. And it reheats well. You can make it on the weekend and eat it all week when you’re too busy to make food. You can freeze it in mason jars without shoulders or even ziplock bags to eat later. When I make soup, it’s like a little gift I give to a future self, a few days on, who is hungry and tired and worn down by whatever the week is throwing at her.
Making anything over and over again is satisfying because of the little sense of control it offers when there is so much else in my life that I have no control over. No matter what I think I’m going to accomplish on any given day, there are forces beyond my control at work against me. At any moment, the kids’ principal might call. Or the school nurse. Or the police. The covid test could be positive. The van might not start. The dog might hurt himself. I might discover animals living secretly inside my house, wreaking havoc. Anything could happen. I have three children, each with his or her own agenda, and so maybe this has multiplied the potential for chaos to arrive in my life. When I think back over 2023, particularly the past few months, it was like one minor crisis after another. Add all of this to societal chaos and stressors, like wars, upcoming elections, and supply chain breakdowns, and it feels wildly daring to believe I can accomplish anything.
I want to sit here, on the brink of a new year, and make goals. I want to say I’ll pitch the one novel I’ve written and self-publish the other. I want to say I’ll send my work out to more publications. I want to say I’ll get a ghostwriting client. But who knows what will happen?
A few days ago, I made potato soup with the leftover Christmas ham. There are a lot of great soup recipes that are perfect for leftover ham, but I chose potato because the people at Eat n’ Park couldn’t get enough of it. There is no universally palatable meal to serve when you have three kids and a picky husband. And my family doesn’t agree with me that soup is the perfect meal, but I have successfully gotten them to eat potato soup in the past. Plus, I had all the ingredients.
I softened the onion in butter—the perfect oil to go with potatoes—and to that I added diced celery and carrots, both of which I also happened to have leftover from the Christmas veggie tray. When all of this was soft and fragrant, in went the Christmas ham. When it was warmed through, I dumped in two heaping tablespoons of flour to make a roux. Aside from dicing, this is perhaps the most advanced cooking skill that making soup requires, and it’s very simple. I stirred until everything was coated and cooked it until the flour started to brown. Then I added chicken broth. Once that had simmered and thickened, I added all the potatoes I’d peeled and diced in the meantime, turned the heat down, topped it with a lid, and let it cook. At the very end, I added heavy cream and cheese and sour cream. The result was delicious—the perfect use of leftovers, the perfect meal. But, like I said, you never know what can happen.
One by one, the kids looked at it and refused to eat the soup. I argued with one of them—the one who most reliably eats potato anything. “It’s good and warm and tastes just like a baked potato.”
He looked in the pot again and wrinkled his nose. “Nahhh.” Then he ran off.
No matter how well-planned or how much love I put into making the soup, or anything else for that matter, there’s no guarantee. And so once again, I cede my aspirations to the forces beyond my control. I’m still glad I made the soup.
Happy New Year, reader.
Melinda
P.S. I have officially been writing this little email newsletter for one year! Thank you for reading it and supporting me. There are five hundred more of you this month than there were in December because of my HuffPost essay, and I’m beyond excited that you’re all here. I’ll try to keep things interesting.
My wife gets frazzled multi-tasking in the kitchen. But she makes the best chicken noodle and vegetable beef soup I’ve ever tasted. Our neighbors would agree!