Soup du jour a la ma mere
My mother’s soup pot was a sight! Long before my I can remember, something had happened to that pot’s lid. I cannot imagine what, but it rendered it unusable, until her father, known to us as Pop, decided that replacing the pot would be a waste of money. He would fix the lid. And so he did. He conjured up a memorable creation by screwing two large wooden spools, emptied of their thread, onto the lid, which, from that moment on, for at least the next half century, served as perfect handles, easy to grip, easy to clean, and proving yet again that old adage about necessity.
Of course, soup was Mom’s specialty, and it was always served with the family soup ladle, the only item retrieved after the huge fire in Arverne, Far Rockaway, which destroyed more than 150 buildings on June 15, 1922. Everything else at my grandmother Peshka’s summer boarding house was lost, including a lot of very hard-earned money. Peshka was undeterred by the setback, and the soup ladle remains a useful, and very beautiful, fourth-generation family treasure in the home of our daughter Amy and her husband Mark.
Following the fire Peshka and Pop moved on to Parksville, and thus the Bauman House was born. That’s where Mom learned, at her mother’s side, to make soup!
Mom was a true gourmet soup maker. Her repertoire was endless and always delicious. She made a fresh pot of soup just about daily, except on Shabbat, and I grew up always counting on mouthwatering delectable soup.
Her chicken soup was exceptional, always deeply flavorful, unlike today‘s bland and tasteless soup of the same name. I don’t understand what happened to chicken soup, but Mom never used the dreaded powder that so many contemporary cooks, often including me, need to bolster the taste of their own soup. I remember her hard at work, especially cleaning the horrid-looking feet of the chickens, who had wandered the earth with no concern for what they might be stepping into, before arriving at their ultimate destination, the pot with the spool handles. Those chickens would today be called free range, and perhaps that’s why they tasted so good.
Of course the pupiks, which, if you’re fancy, you might call gizzards, simmered away together with the feet. These days they have disappeared from our kosher butchers in America, but can readily be found in Israel. Why is that? I simply don’t know!
Necks were also included in the pot’s contents. They’re not around anymore either.
And, always worth an argument, where are the eggs, known as the eyerlach in our mother tongue? Mom’s soup often had an egg, which is not an unborn chick. Usually it was only one, and my sister and I lusted for it and never came up with an equitable distribution. This is the factual origin of the famous phrase, NOT FAIR. Those eggs are not seen in today’s chickens.
Mom always put sweet potato into her soup, lots of chicken, celery, and many large and perfect peeled carrots. An onion never hurt, and she often tossed in the contents of what we call soup greens, an overpriced jumble of vegetables like parsnip, and spices like dill and parsley. There was barely room for the liquid ambrosia! Certainly the noodles or kreplach or kneidlach (which Dad called cannonballs as he never liked them light and feathery) were always cooked separately. You could smell Friday morning in our house. You know what I mean.
During the week there were plenty of other soups to tempt us. My personal favorite was borscht. I am not referring to the soda-like jars of a cold syrupy liquid known as borscht, which Mom never deemed to be authentic, even when laced with sour cream. No. Her borscht was Ukrainian borscht. Or was it Polish? It was made with fat-laden flanken, boiled mercilessly until it disappeared into the liquid making them as one. To this were added lots of beets, laboriously peeled, a huge marrow bone that generations of our family’s dogs deeply loved and spent many hours cleaning until they were pristine, before burial in some never-to-be-forgotten hole in the ground, juice of a lemon, just enough sugar and, at the grand finale, a delectable ribbon of gleaming egg white. This was definitely fleishik, so the sour cream was of course replaced with boiled potatoes. I am now working myself up to a hunger frenzy just writing about it. So delicious! I admit I am not inclined to prepare this delicacy. Too many think of borscht as that stuff in the jar and are not open-minded at all about eating the real true borscht. A pity!
Other specialty soups included split pea, slow cooking all day until the pebbly dried peas miraculously turned into a rich and succulent brew, perfect on any day, but especially on a snowy, bitter cold and windy one, competing with a magical barley and mushroom, the dried mushrooms being transformed into something deep and wonderful.
It struck Mom as strange when she and Dad moved to Israel, and soups were a wintry phenomenon. People would ask why she would make soup when it was so hot and sunny outdoors. As if air conditioning and heat didn’t make the interior temperature a constant so that you could even eat cholent in August!
Similarly, if you’re eating out in Israel even today, don’t bother to order soup until October. You may be treated as an unsophisticate who doesn’t know that soup is seasonal, never to be on the menu during the hotter months.
My mother was known as the Soup Lady wherever she lived. Whenever she heard troubling news about a friend, she grabbed a big container, filled it with her magical broth, and rushed to deliver it. Perhaps she should have been called the Mitzvah Lady. I still dream of her cooking. Especially her soups.
Rosanne Skopp of West Orange is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of nine. She is a graduate of Rutgers University and a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. She is a lifelong blogger, writing blogs before anyone knew what a blog was! She welcomes email at rosanne.skopp@gmail.com