Glorious, Steamy Winter Soup - Grandparents.com

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Molly O'Neill is our Food Editor. She is the former food columnist for The New York Times Magazine. O'Neill is the author of three cookbooks, including the best-selling New York Cookbook (Workman Publishing, 1992), A Well Seasoned Appetite (Penguin, 1997), and The Pleasure of Your Company (Viking, 1997). She was the host of the PBS series Great Food, and edited the critically acclaimed anthology American Food Writing (Library of America, 2007). Her latest work, Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball (Scribner, 2006), recounts her childhood of growing up in a Major-League baseball family.

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by Molly O'Neill

Remembering the subtleties of grandma's soup

“What do you remember most from your grandmother’s kitchen?” I ask people as I travel around the country. Seven out of ten people say “Her soup.” For some it is chicken –– and it is a point of pride, be it the broth with rice or with noodles, with wontons, with fried tortilla strips or with matzo balls. For others it is a vegetable soup, a split-pea soup, a brothy, meaty barley soup, a thick chowder, a creamy tomato soup.

But no matter the particular recipe, the thought of Grandma’s soup tends to bring forth memories of a cold, quiet day, a very old and large pot, and steam creeping up winter windows.

There is something unhurried and everlasting about the comfort of the scene. Many recall being quite small and helping shred chicken or cut vegetables or even turn the crank on a food mill. Soup-making is a wonderful way to enlist young hands. It teaches patience and anticipation.

Others remember soup as a constant living presence in their grandmother’s kitchen. The memories are visceral and strong –– soup simmers slowly, after all, wrapping the kitchen in its aroma for hours.

I don’t remember the taste of grandmother’s chicken and dumplings, yet I remember it in my nose. Nothing that came from a can ever smelled that rich, round, and golden. And nothing was as easy to agree upon, even in a large, boisterous family in which each individual had clear, à la carte tendencies. We never saw the sense in limiting soup to a first course. To us it was a meal, as well as a story of our great grandmother’s journey from Czechoslovakia to the Nebraska plains.

As we listened to tales of buffalo and Apaches and snow drifts higher than the roof of our great-grandfather’s sod hut, we felt the fear, the cold, and the hunger for something that was constant and familiar, something that made you feel warm. At least part of the comfort of soup lies in the stories a soup can tell.

Continue to the recipes: Bread Soup With Wild Mushrooms, Ellen Humphries Mushroom Soup, Grandma Wimmer's Potato Soup, Papa Chuck's Beef & Vegetable Soup, Valeria Ponte's White Mushroom Soup and Ajiaco Soup, and Valorie Arrowsmith's Carrot Soup and her Crème de Carottes Soup recipe