The holiday season has come to an end, but remnants of the many festive meals prepared remain. We have a ham hock for split pea soup, chicken carcasses for colds and flu warrior soup, and beef bones for broth to make the dogs in our life happy. I love the way the kitchen fills with steam when soup making, and how the warm aromas of soupy herbs (those gorgeous thyme, rosemary, and sage I harvested over the summer) permeate every corner of the house.
I’ll be thinking of our family at the holiday table as I make these soups: the conversations and laughter, the recounting of memories and the laying out of new plans, and the candles waning as we lingered over empty plates, reluctant to break the mood.
The family has scattered now – each member back to their every day life. I’ll be thinking of them all while I go about soup making.
Everybody Made Soups by Lisa Coffman
After it all, the events of the holidays, the dinner tables passing like great ships, everybody made soups for a while. Cooked and cooked until the broth kept the story of the onion, the weeping meat. It was over, the year was spent, the new one had yet to make its demands on us, each day lay in the dark like a folded letter. Then out of it all we made one final thing out of the bounty that had not always filled us, out of the ruined cathedral carcass of the turkey, the limp celery chopped back into plenty, the fish head, the spine. Out of the rejected, the passed over, never the object of love. It was as if all the pageantry had been for this: the quiet after, the simmered light,
the soothing shapes our mouths made as we tasted.