When I was young, one of the things that made absolutely no sense to me was soup. How could anyone feel that a bowl of some flavored liquid, even with a few chunks of meat and a few noodles would be fulfilling? I just didn’t get it and had little or no use for soup. Back in 2002 as I was crossing over into middle age, there were a few years when I got into thick pea soup with ham hocks in it from a local diner on 12th Street and Broadway called the Bon Vivant. A group of us guys that were plotting our next career moves with out respective pockets full of money from our last gigs would gather each noon for what we called our $12 lunch. Each day we would each order whatever we wanted at Bon Vivant and then whack it up amongst us. We would marvel at the reality that no matter what any of us ever ordered, the combined total plus tip, split up evenly amongst the 3-7 of us (depending on the day and our schedules) would always equal $12. Every time I went to Bon Vivant, some of us would always order their famous pea soup. I think I got to the point where I didn’t think of pea soup as soup, but really more of a stew, which I never had problems with the way I did with soup.
As I have gotten older, I have changed my perspective on soup. Some might think that is a mastication issue, but I happen to be blessed with strong teeth. I have rarely had trouble with my teeth since my youth. When we lived in Costa Rica in that tropical valley where there was no fluoridation and an abundance of sugar cane, I got a mouthful of silver fillings, but since then, other than replacing them whenever their useful life came to an end, I haven’t had too many fillings or ever anything serious like a root canal. I do have one crown of a bicuspid, and that was only a few years ago, but it had more to do with the shape of the tooth after the filling had gone bad than any serious new damage to it. I have never envied people who have to spend a lot of time at the dentist, and for many years I went only irregularly for cleanings and checkups (feeling that the 6-month thing was more dental promotion than medical necessity). Now I quite religiously go for semi-annual checkups and cleaning and usually have nothing to report other than my marveling at the improvement in dental technology that lets you practically send a drone around each and every tooth filming its every flaw or bit of plaque for viewing by the dentist and me. Speaking of plaque, I only get a little of the stuff and most hygienists have noted that while cleaning my teeth. That again seems to be another genetic advantage I inherited somewhere along the way. But the point is, chewing my food has never been a problem, so soup was never a physical necessity.
Where soup has won some points with me lately is in the department of getting all the flavor I crave from food with only minimal fill. This is much more my situation these days than anything else. My system, still constricted just below the esophageal sphincter (not a pretty word, right) by my 19-year-old plastic Lap Band, will only allow so much food to pass through it and it has quite effectively moderated my appetite for these almost 20 years that I have lived with it. There are times (20 years has still not fully educated me on exactly what causes this) when I get stopped in my eating tracks after two or three bites. Last night was one of those nights. Kim had made a nice meatloaf (my Midwestern roots have always had a fondness for meatloaf) with the unusual starch choice of new salt potatoes. I have nothing against either, but my stomach wasn’t having it, so back it almost all went into the kitchen. My food consumption yesterday (I now track all my calories on a very convenient app called NutraCheck) was particularly low, especially given the amount of yard work I did during the day. What would have helped was having soup for dinner. I know I can always get down at least a half a bowl of soup and feel somewhat fulfilled.
Suddenly, soup makes a lot of sense to me. When Seinfeld was in its heyday, one of its most popular bits was the Soup Nazi. I even once acquired an autographed framed picture of the Soup Nazi, who signed it with the “No soup for you!” epitaph that he made famous. Railing about how it was the best soup was funny, but I am not so sure I could have determined a good versus a mediocre soup. That is not the case today. I know what I like and I find that I occasionally think about soup for dinner in a very positive way, anticipating its flavorfulness combined with its less filling nature. And while I occasionally have pea soup (I just had California Pizza Kitchen’s version on Sunday) I find pleasure in almost all curry soups, chicken tortilla soups, Mexican albondigas soup and some exotic flavors like Indian Mulligatawny, not to mention the ever-popular French onion soups gratinee. My one bad experience with experimenting with soup was in Manhattan when I ordered into the office for lunch from a Chinese restaurant and made the mistake of ordering beef ball soup. I thought it was like albondigas meatballs, but apparently, the Chinese enjoy eating beef balls like they were oysters. That chewy experience has stayed with me for these past fifteen years and may never leave my soup consciousness.
What made me think about soup this morning has a little to do with my rumbling stomach from too little food yesterday, but it has more to do with the weather outside, which seems distinctly like February to me. After a few warm and almost balmy days, we are now due for a few damp and cooler days and it seems to have started off with a morning fog that is enveloping our hilltop. Misty and foggy mornings are pleasant in their own way. Perhaps like soup, they are an acquired taste that comes with age. Here in San Diego where warm and dry mornings are more or less the norm, we grow to appreciate our dewy mornings like this. The garden likes it. Our skin likes it. Even my sinuses seem to like it. It’s not uplifting the way a sunny morning usually is, but serenity has its place and a blanket of fog is nothing if not serene. And not without good coincidence, its on days like this that my mind turns to the thought of a nice soup for lunch or dinner. My Aunt Aggie would be happy to know that I finally understand the attraction of a good soup. She had to suffer more than a few stares from me when a cup of soup and a half sandwich with one slice of thin ham on it was put down in front of me as lunch. Now that sounds like a very adequate lunch and I’m happy to have an excuse to postpone the start of my gardening day today to write about soup rather than go out and hack my way through it with the bags of mulch that await me this morning. In other words, I am happy to be back in the soup again.