My Mother's everything soup

July 2, 2020

I am not a good cook; I am just decent. I cook out of necessity, not passion.

I lived for the first 40 years of my life in communist Romania, enduring food shortages of every imaginable kind. I cooked family meals with unspeakable ingredients, sometimes with the kitchen door closed, sometimes crying over my frying pan. The seventies were bearable, the eighties were manageable, the nineties were heart wrenching. The vocabulary around food changed over time. You were not buying food, you were “finding it.” The food was not sold, it was “given.” Shopping for food was “hunting.” It was like food was some mysterious and rare animal, ever elusive, ever hiding somewhere, and you had to be in a permanent state of alert to spot the lines in front of the stores and wait for hours for two chicken thighs. This was just enough to feed a family of four a two-course meal. These food shortages were political, it was one of the instruments of oppression used by the communist party to ensure the obedience of the masses. The other forms of oppression were rooted in heat and hot water distribution in the winter, which were also terrible to endure.

There are two words in Romanian for soup: one is supa from the French word soupe, essentially a clear broth like the one used in chicken noodle soup. The other is ciorba (tchiorba), derived from the Turkish corba and going back to Iranian rooted languages, which is a sour minestrone type of soup.

Ciorba continues to be a central meal in my family and it is part of my mother’s legacy. It has been a staple and comfort food for as long as I can remember. My mother, Elena, used to say that if you have a bowl of ciorba and bread you won’t go to bed hungry. She always started to cook by putting a big pot of water to boil on the back burner of her cast iron stove. This act was the beginning of her everything soup.

My mother was beautiful, graceful, kind and unassuming. She was very smart and had a will of steel. She would ply you to her will in the gentlest way, and most of the time this happened unknowingly. She had the most amazing blue eyes and soft honey blond hair. Unfortunately, none of her children or grandchildren were granted the gift of blue eyes, but my son inherited her hair colour, and my daughter her gentle will of steel.

My mother also taught us all how to be perfectly groomed and well dressed on any occasion on a very small budget. It helped that she was an artist with a needle and thread. She made all our family outfits, except for my father’s suits, and very often reused adult clothes to make children’s clothing. The fabrics were rationed, as every household had a coupon booklet, which had to be stretched out for the whole year. For her, any scrap of fabric was precious, and any tea towel or humble apron had to be beautiful. Embroidery, lace, macramé, knitting, she excelled at all. As a young woman, she dreamed of going to college to teach domestic arts. But the second world war and the postwar realities she experienced crushed that goal. She got married at the end of the war to a young and handsome soldier she met at an officer’s ball, just before he left for the frontlines. Five years later, the same young, handsome, and now worn and dirty young man knocked on her parents’ door, returning from the war with a ragged uniform, a couple of medals, and a set of cutlery as his only possessions. The “war cutlery” was from a Czech castle where he and his men were ambushed by Germans for a couple of months and cut off from army supplies. They survived on a couple of potato sacks, a barrel of lard and nettles from the courtyard. He always said that his spoon knew only the taste of nettle soup for too long, and he spent the rest of his life trying to offer it something better. Maybe his insistence on using this cutlery was his way of telling us that we all needed to remember the hard times in order to fully enjoy what life was offering us. Or maybe the cutlery was his talisman; as long as he had it, he would be safe. In the end, I am not sure, as we never discussed the reason he maintained this taboo. He was a great father nevertheless and we happily granted him this small wish.

In our household, there was no everyday cooking. The meals were planned in my mom’s mind a week in advance and cooked all in one day, usually on Sundays, as the working week was 6 days long in 1960s communist Romania. She would cook a big pot of soup and three mains, two of them finished, one half finished. These meals were rotated the whole week for lunch and dinner. “What do you want to eat?” was the rhetorical question we never asked. Fortunately, she was a good cook. To this day, I still cook once a week, as she always did.

Cooking day in my mother’s kitchen usually started early in the morning by aligning all the ingredients on the kitchen table and deciding what to cook. My younger brother was often sent to the garden to gather some vegetables. At this point, the menu was clear in my mother’s mind. She would cook in the most efficient way, starting all dishes at the same time, chopping vegetables and adding each ingredient as needed. Let’s say the week’s meat was a big piece of pork shoulder. The bones were carefully carved out and went into the soup pot first. The middle meaty part was set aside for a roast, the small pieces gathered together for a ragout and part of them minced for stuffed peppers. Five or six big onions were then chopped and divided between the soup, the ragout, the stuffing and the roast. Following this, three to four carrots would also be chopped and divided where needed. So, by the end of the cooking day, the soup pot included everything that was used in the other dishes and happily simmered on the back burner. This is how my mother’s soup came to be named “everything soup.” The taste was never the same as there was no formal recipe for the soup.

When I was old enough to be trusted with a knife, maybe around 10 or 12, I was promoted to kitchen helper and cooked alongside my mother. I was mainly in charge of the prep and general help. She would tell me “give me that thing from over there,” which meant I had to watch what she was doing and determine what she needed and where I could find it. It was in my mother’s kitchen that I learned critical thinking, logic, and pattern recognition. I also learned how to plan and focus in this space.

I am often reminded of my mother during this pandemic. Of her graceful resilience, her search for beauty in every object, and her unending efforts to shield her children and grandchildren from the scarcity of the communist era. We will all need to rethink our priorities and look for simpler ways to enjoy life and beauty, as I’m sure the post-pandemic period will continue to be difficult and unsettling.

6 servings

Here are the core ingredients and the recipe.

• 2 L water

• Pork bones, any kind

• 3 big onions, chopped

• 3 carrots, diced

• 1 parsley root, diced

• ¼ celery root diced

• 2 small potatoes, diced

• Green beans, zucchini, pepper strips, if at hand or left over from another dish

• 2-3 tomatoes or ½ can diced tomatoes

• Parsley and lovage

• Borcht for the sour-ish taste (the Romanian borscht is a specific ingredient, see definition here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bor%C8%99_(bran)

Put the pork bones in boiling water, lower the heat and very diligently remove the white scum forming on top. Add onions and all other roots chopped. When roots are tender, add diced potatoes. Let boil at low heat until potatoes are tender. Add tomatoes and let simmer. At the end, add borscht, let boil, put aside, add parsley and lovage finely chopped and cover. Can be served as is, or with a dollop of sour cream or Greek yogurt.

Carmen Radu is a first generation immigrant who has called Montreal, Canada her home for the last 30 years. Happily retired, she enjoys zumba, science fiction, and sewing for charity.