One could argue that coming back to writing on this blog with a story about soup is not the most glamorous way and I could agree. Yet, what better but a simple story to get back on track with my writing days?
I am entering this new year with a cold. Nothing out of the extraordinary in Swedish winter but this kind of annoying combo of fever, sore throat and running nose that leaves you looking like an old cloth in less that 2 days and the energy of a locomotive out of steam.
My first action was to press some lemon, add some fresh ginger, star anise and honey and wait for the cold to pass in the warmth of my bed. Remembering I am not living alone, I was about to propose to order some food delivery when I thought of one of my great grandmothers for whom a soup would always save the day.
Melina, that was her name, was a very pragmatic and strong woman. Some would say she was a bit boorish. Born in 1890 in a small vineyard village in the northeast of France, she got married in 1913 just before the first world war and did not get much of one year of nuptial felicity before the war took her husband to the battlefield as well as all the male members of her family.
So, there she was in 1914, pregnant and handling the direction of a small vineyard and work in the fields with her twin sister Camille while their husbands were on the Verdun's battlefields. These were hard, very hard days and no wonder that Melina became quite a fierce and resourceful woman.
When I close my eyes, the first memories of her are a tiny woman of few words and smile, quite authoritarian, always wearing black and smelling of lavender and rosemary. I think I may have been a little afraid of her even if I was following her like a shadow at each of her steps, when my parents or my grandparents left me at her house and even if obviously, she was quite fond of me as her very first grandkid.
For a kid, Melina's house was an infinite source of curiosity, but the kitchen and the garden were my favorite places. The house was an old winegrower's house with heavy walls, small windows and low ceiling. The kitchen was the heart of it with its ceramic stove that was heating the whole house. Different aromatic herb and flower bunches were hanged at the ceiling, waiting to be dried enough to then be stored in jars that Melina would use for bouillons, tisanes and other homemade medications.
The whole house furniture has been made by my great grandfather, a fine carpenter, out of the trees in the forest and orchards around. Oak, chestnut tree and plum tree. The melted smell of the wooden furniture, the drying herbs and flowers, the ceramic stove on which there always was a coffee pot, ready to serve, were a part of my childhood that I wish I had the talent to put into a bottle to keep forever.
From generations of winegrower's wives and daughters, my great grandmother Melina was used from a young age to cook in large quantities with the minimum ingredients to nourish seasonal workers that would come to help for the harvests.
Some seasons were not that lucky and Melina would then have to compose with the vegetables from the garden and not that much of meat and fat. For those bad days, she would use all her knowledge in herbs and vegetables to make a feast of the simplest soup.
Soup.
For many French people, soup is probably the most common meal of all. The meal one has when not being rich enough to have meat at every meal. The word itself is not used in fancy menus... One would prefer a "potage", a "consommé" or a "velouté" and lately a bouillon can be the hype on a menu while the soup refers to a very old and rustic meal: a slice of bread on which one pours some bouillon made of vegetables and meat when one could have a fat meat to give taste and richness to it.
In short, the soup was a meal for poor people.
My great grandmother was not a woman who would care of being fancy and staying at her place for dinner from fall to early spring, you would have had a soup for dinner because there was nothing a soup would not help with. So, she would adjust herbs and spices with the vegetables, meat or fish or fat, according to the circumstances: the weather, what she had in the pantry, if one was sick. Staying with her was a full discovery of all kinds of bouillons that would be base of all kinds of potages, veloutés and consommés which she would always end up calling a soup because she would always call a spade a spade.
And that is how on the second day of January, I got out of my warm bed to put the stove on and prepare a soup like Melina would have done. Maybe at this point of the story, you would like to see the recipe of the soup in the picture?
Well, I may disappoint you as soup is the only meal I do not following a recipe but just "going with the flow" as my great grandmother was doing. A few tips I learned from her though: I always begin by making sweat one big yellow onion, or two small, in the pot with unsalted butter, salt, pepper, brown sugar and nutmeg, In Sweden, I recently found a spice mix called umami under the brand Santa Maria and it is quite good. When onions are colored, I add a branch of celery sliced in small cubes, two cups of water and I let it go to gently boiled to make the base of the bouillon. Then I cut the vegetables I have, I especially like the mix of carrots, turnips, pumpkin, leek and potato, put them in the pot and cover with water. I let it go to boil for 3 minutes, add water if needed to keep the vegetables covered, add 2 branches of rosemary, thyme and laurel and lower the stove to let it cook gently. When all vegetables are tender, it is time to mix and enjoy dinner!
PS: the spoon on the picture is from a cutlery set that was in Melina's house and that I could have a few pieces after my grandmother Marguerite, her daughter, died.
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