Start with a soup bone, one with plenty of meat on it, and some marrow left in the bone. That’s how soup was made in the little house on Hwy 329 where I grew up. My mother bought hers at the local grocery, and it was always labeled “Soup Bone.” Where I live now, the supermarket doesn’t sell anything resembling that so sometimes I have to buy an expensive package of short ribs in order to make this peasant dish. My mother grew up during the Great Depression eating soup beans and cornbread because it was cheap and could be stretched for a family with six daughters. Vegetable soup was another staple because it used odds and ends and there was always enough for several meals.

My mother was a farmer’s daughter and even when she moved to town, she grew her own tomatoes and canned them in Mason jars. When you opened one in January and ate a dish of chilled tomatoes, summer was in the bowl. Sometimes during winter, one of these jars would explode in the furnace room as if all that bottled-up summer sunlight simply couldn’t contain itself any longer. Those were exciting events. My mother used a jar of these precious tomatoes as a base for the broth that the soup bone lazily bubbled and bathed in on a burner set on low. 

She added chopped onions and carrots early on to lend complex earth tones to the broth. The soil where my grandmother and mother planted their gardens was in Kentucky, which my history books in school called “Dark and Bloody Ground.” Watered with tears and blood of warring Native Americans and early settlers and with the sweat of generations of my own family to beat a marginal living from the land, it holds the bodies of my ancestors from hundreds of years back, peasants and hillbillies all, scattered in forgotten, lonely graves around the state.

The rest of the ingredients in my mother’s soup varied depending on what was fresh or in the freezer: butterbeans, shredded cabbage, green beans, corn.

In summer, we always brought a paper bag full of Silver Queen corn back home from our visits to relatives in the country. We sat in the yard to shuck it, and I liked the satisfaction of removing the soft, silky tassels but feared pulling down a husk to reveal a worm. But that’s life, right? I preferred sitting under a shade tree with a pile of green beans to be snapped while my mother and her sisters traded family stories and gossip. My mother cooked the green beans she didn’t can in the pressure cooker with bacon grease until they were soft and satiny and rich with flavor. She always kept a can of bacon drippings on the back of the stove, a habit passed down by her own mother. Every now and then, I save the grease from a batch of bacon that I cook in the oven in the less messy, modern way, but it never transforms my food as it did hers. 

Once all these ingredients simmered and steamed up the windows of our tiny kitchen, my mother added diced potatoes at the end. I’ve changed the recipe to substitute turnips. I admire the translucent quality of their cooked flesh and the way they stand up to the beefy liquid and bumptious vegetables and the slivers of meat you’ve pulled off the bone to float in fat-spangled broth. I don’t think she’d mind because she loved turnips as much I do.

I don’t remember helping my mother make soup when I was growing up, but I must have absorbed the process by proximity. We never had her write down the directions, and to this day, my brother and I argue about the recipe. He persists in adding beef broth and tomato paste, while I turn my nose up at that as heretical post-mother additions. Why not buy a can of Campbell’s Vegetable Soup, I sneer. He once sent me a handwritten recipe he claims is my mother’s, but it’s clearly a forgery. Tomato paste? Really? She lives on in these arguments, and we love to have them.

If you wait to eat the soup until the next day, it will have time to marry all the flavors into a unique vegetal communion, a holy rite of everyday eucharist when served with cornbread pancakes with lacy brown edges and dripping with butter. And that is how my mother made the vegetable soup that I can never quite duplicate except in my memory, the soup I can still taste in my dreams.

Nikki Hardin is a writer of stories, musings, and memories. Her poetry has been published in Riverteeth Journal. She was the founder and publisher of skirt!, a monthly women’s magazine in Charleston, South Carolina. You can reach her at nikki@thedailynikki.com.