By Charles Layton
Behold how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity.
(Psalm 133:1)
I was reading Tom Valenti’s One-Pot Meals just now, and he started praising the glories of slow cooking. Suddenly I was walking into our house in Mason City after church on Sunday, being met by the mouth-watering aroma of soup simmering in the old Westinghouse electric range’s “deep well.” For you who never had that experience, a deep well was one of the back burners that could be dropped down into a “well” that just fit the special aluminum kettle that came with the range. It was a slow cooker before there were crock pots. Mom would put the soup together before church, drop the kettle into the well, and turn the deep well burner on button one or two. (Yes, this was one of those fantastic late-fifties—early sixties electric ranges that was all push-button modern!)
As soon as we walked in from the garage, we could tell by the smell whether we were having pinto bean or vegetable beef soup. I was in heaven either way. As much as I liked the soup, the best part was when we made sandwiches of white bread spread with butter, and shredded some of the soup meat onto the sandwich. My mouth is watering right now. (When David responded to reading this, I was very happy to see that he too loved those simple meat sandwiches!) If bean soup, the meat was ham, and if vegetable, it was beef. Almost always the meat was left over from one or more suppers of the week before.
Mom went through a phase where she baked fresh bread to eat with the soup. Since I don’t remember her going through all the machinations of making bread, I’m pretty sure she started with the new wonder product, frozen bread dough. Oh my! Now, THAT really took everything up three or four notches.
Since Mom’s death, I’ve tried to replicate her soups. I never really watched closely as she made them, so I can’t reproduce the rich, yet clean flavors of them. You’d think I could ask my sister, but she loves to improvise and create new flavors, so much so that I don’t think she would even want to copy Mom’s soup. I think that the secret is in not over-thinking it. Some left-over pot roast, onions, tomatoes, and celery simmered in a simple broth. I do know that Mom put some ketchup in each of the soups. In fact, if there was a bottle in the fridge that was one-third or less full, it all went in. (We’re talking about the old-style glass bottles that I think held less than today’s plastic squeeze bottles.) And then she would run a little water in the bottle, swish, and pour that in as well. Waste not, want not.
Eventually, we bought a new range. It was pretty deluxe, with two ovens. The one up above the burners, with a glass door, had a rotisserie. Mom always complained that they had made the mistake of not putting the rotisserie in the bottom oven, which was self-cleaning—so she almost never used the rotisserie as it meant the big job of cleaning the oven of all the spatter. The stove top had one burner that had an automatic stirrer. There was a magnet under the burner, and you would drop a paddle affair into the pot, flip a switch, and the paddle would go round and round, stirring the food constantly. Mom always used it for making hot cocoa. And, although this marvel of modernity didn’t have a Deep Well, the old Deep Well pot from the old stove made its way into the pot cabinet, and on Sundays it would still sit on the back of the stove, lovingly simmering the soup for Sunday Dinner.
There was a fair amount of drama in our house between us kids. Major or minor spats, skirmishes or knock-down fights were common, as was sniping at each other. But that pot of soup and bread on Sunday was usually a time of calm. We were all focused on the goodness—not just of the food, but of the table, the house, the company. It isn’t just chicken soup that’s good for the soul.
