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.

Home Cooking Disclaimer

I feel the need to make this disclaimer now, before things get messy. This disclaimer applies to parents, grandparents, and others who bore the burden of cooking dinners for their families.

From time to time, foodies will criticize home cooking. Sometimes it is to mock the mistakes of others' parents and caretakers. Most often, though, they are directing their attention to their own memories, to the foods, fair and poor, of their own youth. Naturally, these foods have embedded emotions in their chefs as well as their "customers," and so can arise the defense of these foods as a sacred category, unable to be assaulted.

However, these home cooked meals cannot be held faultless, for ill or for good. The foods that each of us grow up with shape us as people, shape our attitudes toward food and its ingredients, direct or turn away our attention from cooking and culinary arts. The kitchens of our youth are the hearths of our hearts; we remember fondly into our age our favorite meals, the times we were honored to help in the kitchen. But likewise, we also remember with disgust the meals that went wrong.

It isn't that we are expressing hate for their creators. We have created dishes of our own that we have hated, and have not hated ourselves in the process. In my own experience, I can recount many things that I found distasteful in that memory of the kitchen and its products, but I remember the care of my mother in cooking them with fondness. I do not hold her to blame because she had no harmful intent. But the dishes were what they were, good or bad, and can be judged independent of their creators.

So if you read something in this blog, or elsewhere, that points negative attention to a home cooked dish, do your best to restrain your defensive emotions. Food is personal, and we are entitled to our opinions of those dishes. If we wish to assault the chef, we are witty enough to do so - and in home cooking, we are rarely wont to.