Big Soup

We had Big Soup for supper tonight. For St. Patrick's Day I usually cook up a huge pot of Corned Beef and Cabbage. Or as my family has always called it: Big Soup.


Big Soup is what my sister, Jean, named any kind of a boiled dinner after she saw the stewing pot full of whole vegetables and a single chunk of meat burbling in the broth. She was only a few years old at the time.

Now, a New England Boiled Dinner is poor people food. You know, sometimes poor people eat pretty dang good.

Anyhoo, my mom would cook up a boiled dinner two or three times a month. She most often used a ham. She would put this huge hunk of meat in a humongous stewing pot and cook it all day. By the time I got home from school, the kitchen was all steamy and you could almost taste the air.



At four o'clock, mom would add the vegetables. First, in went 2 or 3 small, whole, peeled onions. Scrubbed potatoes, whole, with the skins left on, were put into the bubbling pot next. Then whole peeled carrots went in. Last in was the quartered cabbage.

By five o'clock, it was done. My mom was a farmer's daughter so we ate farmer food on a farmer's time schedule. Dad, who was not a farmer, didn't seem to mind and neither did any of the rest of us. We ate our meal with thick slices of crusty Balkan bread to soak up the juice. I think they call it 'artisan' bread now. La-di-da.

Anyway, all this was going through my mind today while I was in the kitchen making Big Soup with corned beef and cabbage.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!