Photo courtesy of Monika Grabowska/Unsplash
My favorite smell that ever came out of my grandmother’s kitchen was that of vegetables and chicken broth. From when I walked into my grandparents’ house at sundown every other Friday night to when I left into the pitch-black night, my grandmother would always loiter in her kitchen.
“Ahh! You’re here!” she would shout down to the open foyer area in her thin but still recognizable Australian accent.
Even if there was nothing to cook, bake or clean, it was her happy place. She was able to be creative and spread happiness to the family with her food.
My grandma made sure that the infinite variety of vegetables were thoroughly hand washed before she began to chop them up into minuscule pieces. She would never buy the vegetables pre-cut or pre-washed from the store. While a side effect of the “straight from the ground” vegetables may have been a fresher taste, my belief is that it just made her feel good to know she created her entire work of art from scratch.
My grandma met my grandpa when he was traveling to Australia on a business trip. He loved Aboriginal art, and Australia had a lot of it. At the ages of 23 and 33, my grandma and grandpa married in Australia. Soon after, my grandma adopted the United States as her new, permanent home. My grandparents went back to Australia at least once every two years to visit my grandmother’s side of the family. Sometimes, I was unsure of how my grandma’s love for my grandpa ever outweighed her love for her siblings, her parents and her country.
I would sit at the kitchen table and watch her go vegetable by vegetable, throwing them into the blender like Jackson Pollock threw paint onto a canvas, miscellaneously but with a clear vision in mind. I would offer to help my grandma, but there were only so many jobs I could do without compromising the integrity of the dish. My favorite job was to peel the potatoes and carrots. She always kept two old-style vegetable peelers that looked like they had come straight from her ‘50s childhood home. I would peel the skins off the vegetables, barely missing my fingers every time. While my grandma had showed me how to peel vegetables countless times, my technique could never parallel her own.
While my grandma was creating her art in the kitchen, my grandfather’s job was to stay out of her way. He would sit in their bedroom upstairs and watch the financial program that aired every day at 5 o’clock. On commercial breaks, he would come down to scout out the pantry. He ended up taking the same, plain breadstick every time, but it took him a minute to realize that it was what he wanted.
Once all the vegetables were prepared to my grandma’s liking, she would begin putting them in the blender. In no particular order, she would add the celery, the sweet potato and peas, the carrots and greens, and a few other ingredients my grandma would not tell me about because then I “would not eat the soup.” She would add the broth to the combination (for texture purposes) and then blend it all together. By the time the mixture was done, you could not tell it was a mixture at all. It was simply soup.
After my grandpa’s program ended, he would come downstairs to sit at the kitchen table and read his newspaper. He often picked out articles he believed I would appreciate and gave them to me to read. When my grandpa would ask if I ever read the news, I would tell him that I often did, on my phone.
“Oh, that little machine…,” he would say. My grandpa was not fond of playing on or receiving information from cell phones; however, I know he secretly enjoyed having access to his emails at his fingertips. It took him less than a flick of the wrist.
As I set the table for dinner, my grandma would put the soup into her large, metal pot with the two black handles and then put that onto the stove. First, I would put out the place mats as my grandma poured the last few spoonfuls of soup from the blender into the bottomless pot. Then, I would place the napkins on the left side of the place mats. My grandma then turned up the gas burner high, which sent a wave of heat through the kitchen. Next was the silverware. A fork on top of the napkin to the left, then a spoon on the right accompanied by a knife with the serrated edge facing towards the inside of the placemat, of course. The soup pot then needed to be covered with the matching metal top. The smell of the plentiful, vegetable soup heating up was parallel with one of my grandma’s love.
After the soup was made and the table was set, we would all sit down for dinner and my grandma would divide out the soup into bowls. She always gave me the biggest serving because she knew it was my favorite. Once the soup was served, my grandma would put the leftovers in a tall, plastic Tupperware for me to take home and eat the next day.
While the soup that my grandma made will always have a special place in my heart, I could never ask for the recipe. Just like my grandma believed the soup would not taste as good if she did not wash and peel the vegetables herself, the soup would not taste as good if she were not the one making it.
