As long as I can remember, I’ve loved Mom’s vegetable soup. It was the “treat” I requested after my daughter was born (in non-soup June), following months of a strict gestational diabetes diet. Mom’s soup may be the original comfort food. It took me almost 30 years to come close to replicating it, but my soup is finally passable.
Why would a highly literate woman have so much trouble making soup? Because there’s never been a recipe to read.
Instead, there was a Tupperware container in the freezer, full of goodness frozen one layer at a time. Leftover green beans? Scrape them into the soup container. Leftover roast? Into the container. Please, Mom, no hominy. I hate that stuff. Leftover Lima beans? Corn? Carrots? Into the container. Layer by layer, Mom’s soup was built.
Eventually the frozen layers would spend a day simmering in the crockpot. The house never smelled better than on vegetable soup days. Vegetable soup days smelled safe and warm—like happiness and home, time and patience. Those days, love became an aroma.
Once the soup was soup instead of layers of frozen leftovers, Mom would assess and add. The vegetables were never the same ratio twice, but the soup was always perfect and somehow even better the next day.
That soup was clearly the result of kitchen magic, and I spent decades trying to recreate the magic.
Turns out, I was doing it all wrong. Still am. Even now, when I can get the taste and texture and aroma just about to Mom’s level, I don’t get there the same way.
No, I lack the presence of mind to keep a soup-building bowl in my freezer. Instead, vegetable soup days at my house happen all at once, not over the course of autumn and winter weeks. My soup is seasoned and simmered en masse, stirred together in a matter of minutes. The meat in my soup isn’t leftover roast; it’s prepackaged stew meat bullied to tenderness in my pressure cooker. My potatoes aren’t fresh; they are a handful of frozen hash browns. My vegetables are frozen (never canned) and any beans are dry at the start of the soup. My soup lacks the baseness of Mom’s. It’s made from scratch, but not the same scratch.
It tastes like Mom’s, smells like Mom’s, looks like Mom’s, but it’s not Mom’s soup. Some things cannot be forced or rushed. Layers of formation, of growth, of development are so obvious in nature. When in doubt, I trust nature. Trees, mountains, rocks, land—all in rings or layers or stages, just like that soup.
It’s hard to be patient, to allow the soup to ready and improve one meal at a time. Remembering to add what’s left to the Tupperware, then tuck it back into the freezer—trusting the process of the bowl—well, it’s tricky. I have a tendency to eat my leftovers as reheated versions of themselves; I don’t think far enough ahead to turn those leftovers into vegetable soup.
All these years, I’ve been trying to make in minutes or hours what took weeks to build, and these past 14 months, I’ve been searching for . . . what? Resolution? I sign that I’m “better?” A wholesome pot of mental soup?
I think I need to keep adding to the Tupperware—all I learn, any progress I make, those glimmers of hope and emotional bolsters—and one day it’ll be soup day.
But, are you there, God? It’s me, Tonya. Small favor. Could you hold the hominy? We’ve had enough for a good long while.
Woods Writes 