One Hundred Things My Mother Taught Me A Million Times – Chapter 53

#53 – “Add a little milk to bowls of soup right before you serve.  The milk will cool the soup to just the right temperature, and give it a rich flavor and texture.”

This morning, as I often do when I’m trying to decide what to write about, I called my husband on his cell and asked him to give me a number between 52 and 100.  He was in the bedroom; I was in the living room.  “Eighty-seven,” he said, and hung up.  When I saw #87, I smiled.

Back before dairy became the bane of our existence (and ironically just about everyone was thin), whole milk was the standard and served in our home with regularity and in abundance.  In fact, other than water, iced tea and milk were pretty much the only liquids served in our home.    We didn’t have soft drinks, orange juice, alcohol or anything else in a bottle.  I remember with vibrant clarity the first time I saw a pitcher of red Kool Aid at a friend’s home.  I felt as though magic had been performed.  I also felt as though I had been born into the wrong family. Click on Read More Below...

 However, no one was better at making more with less than my mom. I don’t remember there ever being more than 20 food items in our home at any one time:  milk, eggs, bacon, bread, potatoes, onion, sugar, flour, Crisco, salt, pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, vanilla, a meat (usually pork chops or a soup bone), and occasionally one can of vegetables (either corn or spinach). Today I doubt most of us keep less than 200 items in our pantry, refrigerator, and spice cabinet.

Mom would make bread pudding or custard pie for dessert, which only required flour, bread, sugar, eggs, milk, vanilla, Crisco and salt. She would make pork chops and potatoes and gravy for dinner, which required meat, potatoes, flour, salt, pepper, Crisco and milk. Her potato soup was potatoes, onion, milk, salt, and pepper.  Life, like our meals, was simple.

After dad died, we were pretty poor (mom was a teacher).  Toward the end of the month mom would buy a big soup bone (probably the cheapest thing our little home-town butcher offered).  She would boil it to smithereens, coaxing out every ounce of flavor and adding a few potatoes, onions and a little salt (sometimes corn).  We would eat that for days.  Mom would ladle out the soup, which looked rather thin and bland but included a few tender and delicious lumps of meat that fell away from the bone.  It was always steaming and too hot to eat. Then she would pour a little milk on top of the soup and turn it into something rich and exotic and warm and creamy.

At mom’s funeral, with tears and laughter in her eyes, my daughter Jolene told the story of how much she hated it when Memaw (mom) put milk in her soup.  “I would always say ‘no milk Memaw!’ and she would pour it in anyway; that was just so ‘Memaw.’”

To this day, I always add milk to my soup because mom was right.  Milk cools the soup to just the right temperature, and gives it a rich flavor and texture. It is often the simplest things that we remember and which touch our hearts forever.