Some people call fall spooky season, pumpkin spice season, sweater season. But I call it soup season.
The cold weather is a cruel distance between lonely strangers. When all you want to do is cuddle under a blanket or sit by a fire, the next best thing is a bowl of soup.
I have been thinking about soup as metaphor for life.
A life of soup is one of comfort and nourishment. A life of soup is also about resilience, of the skill to keep going today, with grace and gratitude, despite what horrors tomorrow might bring. It’s about the ability to make a meal out of almost nothing—a carcass and some vegetable scraps are transformed into a nutrient dense and delicious broth.
I come from a long line of soup makers. Chicken soup, matzo ball, minestrone, tortellini en brodo, borscht. I guess soup is a primary interest of mine. I went down a historical rabbit hole researching the 19th century turtle soup craze, and then went all the way to Borneo to find the delicacy of Bird’s Nest Soup (both of which you can read all about in my book Feasting Wild).
Remarkably, every culture has some sort of soup. It is a universally common method of cooking. The earliest soups were probably made in pits lined with animal skins or guts. Fire heated stones were dropped in to boil the water. Historical soups were often an everlasting meal, as whatever was on hand that day would be added to the cauldron from the day before, a continuous taste, a recipe without end.
Soup inherently cultivates community. It is very hard to make just one bowl of soup from scratch. There is almost always an entire pot. My goal this fall is to have a weekly soup party—a soup exchange. To invite some friends over to eat soup, and then take a mason jar of the soup home, and the next week, another friend hosts the soup social, and we get a new soup for that week. Soup for sustenance, spoonfuls of delight.
Or maybe we just need an app: Soup Exchange—a social network for people to trade soup, share soup, talk about soup, post recipes of soup, become soup, etc.
But of course, contemplating soup brings up more questions than answers...
Are soup and stew the same thing? What about broth?
Is soup more hydrating than water?
How many soup recipes exist in the whole world?
What new soup will become trendy next?
And with that, here are a few writing prompts for the week ahead. Happy slurping!
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