Pea Soup

"It looks like that someone threw up, someone else added ham and they put it in a bowl for you to eat. YUCK !"
Experience Project, I Hate Pea Soup

For those of you who feel this way about pea soup - it's okay. Even lovers of this old soup find it hard to disagree with the sentiment. When you take a green or yellow starchy vegetable, and mash it or slow cook it, well - the results are going to be of a similar color. And, after all, we are an extraordinary people, who supposedly have taste buds in our eyeballs. That which looks like vomit, must therefore taste like vomit.

It is actually strange enough that I, who as a child, like many, detested vegetables of most kinds, adored pea soup. Come to think of it, I tended toward vegetables most hated (peas, brussel sprouts, okra) and veered from those more liked or known (lettuce, tomato, onion.) But that's another story. I was still a picky eater as a child, and if I didn't like the looks of something, then my lips were tight-shut, no matter how much I got yelled at. Pea soup, then, should have been a given.

Nevertheless, something remained eternally compelling about the smoky, earthy flavor of peas, potatoes, carrots, and ham, slow cooked all day. Maybe it's because the soup goes back to our earthen, hearth roots, where meals stewed in a pot over the fire in the center of the home were a staple. The ingredients, too, are simple and richly draw us back to the farm. Of course the soup isn't beautiful to look at, but that doesn't matter. It is beautiful to taste; it returns us to the deep, earthly roots of our race, of our humanity, of our soul.

So the next time you're faced with pea soup, take a taste of it, and think back to your memories. Perhaps you have no childhood memories, but below that, deep down, is the memory in your flesh, of a food more natural and a cooking more soulful than your street-fare cuisine.