Family Chuckle: Cold weather stirs warm feelings for making soup

By DONNA SCOFIELD

It's soup weather again, and I'm glad. There's something homey and comforting about a pot of soup simmering on the stove. When you come in from the cold and your glasses steam up, the aroma says "Welcome home!"

I usually make soup every Monday. That's bowling night. The bowlers think an early soup supper makes them get a better score, and another bowl when they get home helps them celebrate or soothes their hurt, depending on what that score actually was.

Mom made soup often when I was a kid. There was always a pot of beans on laundry day. She could start it early, and then when she was finished with the laundry, the pot didn't require any attention and she could devote her time to holding an icepack on whichever body part she'd run through the wringer. Laundry was dangerous for buxom women in those days. Only once did she lean over those revolving wringer rollers to try to peel off a little sock wrapped around it.

Mom made good potato soup, and that was my favorite when I was sick. Her chili was fantastic. There were other kinds of soup, but we always had to approach them with caution. Mom had a tendency to throw in strange things, especially if she had a surplus of them. Finding lima beans in your clam chowder meant that in the future, you took that first mouthful with a sense of either adventure or doom, depending on whether you were a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty type of person.

Both Russ' mom and mine made wonderful oyster stew. Stew was a strange name for what was essentially rich milk, salt and pepper with butter slicks floating on top. Oh, and a pleasantly briny taste, as though someone had pulled an oyster through the milk really fast. Both our dads liked the oysters, which was lucky for us. Otherwise, we might have had to eat some ourselves, and we both hated them. To me, they looked like baby mice that had drowned in the milk.

Russ' mom made a wonderful vegetable soup, which was amazing because she didn't even like vegetables, and never ate them. When she made the soup, she got out the old iron food-grinder that screwed onto the countertop, and ground the vegetables into chunks too small to identify. The fact that they no longer resembled vegetables must have made it edible for her. It looked gross, but the taste was unbelievably good. I make the same soup for my family, but don't grind the vegetables. To save time, I use hamburger instead of a soup bone. But the aroma is as wonderful as it was when Grandma Scofield made it. Sometimes it almost tastes as good, too.

Russ' mom also made great clam chowder. Even now, he rates clam chowder by how close it comes to what his mother used to cook. I have to agree. It was delicious. We were both sad when the only local restaurant that came close went out of business.

I think making soup brings out the Earth Mother in me. I feel so virtuous, like I've nurtured my part of the world. Unfortunately, I can't seem to scale down from when the kids were still home, so it sometimes takes my part of the world many days to empty the pot.

When the kids were growing up, soup was a tradition for some occasions. A pot of chili was cooked for the first cold Saturday in autumn. We always had homemade vegetable soup on Halloween ... a bowl before trick-or-treating to give them strength, and a bowl afterwards, to warm them up and hopefully balance out the sugar.

We usually had special soups on Christmas Eve. My clam chowder wasn't as good as Russ' mom's, but sometimes pretty close. I tried a fancy seafood bisque once, but it didn't fly. Too much time and money at the seafood store, and too many unidentifiable sea creatures in one bowl for the kids' taste. I made a spectacular chicken and mushroom soup with tiny dumplings one year. Unfortunately, I didn't write it down as I made it up, and every time I try it again, it tastes different.

I went through a phase when I figured homemade bread to accompany the homemade soup would really give me an Earth Mother blue-ribbon classification. About the time I'd practiced enough to have success in the form of a golden loaf, crusty on the outside and tender on the inside, I realized that most of the family didn't need the extra temptation (and pounds) it brought. But boy, did it smell good! Combine the aroma of baking bread with simmering vegetable soup, and you don't have a struggle to get the family to dinner.

Darn it, I've made myself hungry. I'm going to start a pot of soup, and
it isn't even Monday. I hope it does-n't upset the universe, and shove me out of Earth Mother classification. But oh, well, it'll be worth it.

* Donna Scofield is a freelance writer whose articles, columns and short fiction stories have appeared in numerous national and regional magazines. The longtime Yakima resident is retired after working as a secretary and office manager in Yakima elementary schools. She has raised two sons and two daughters.

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