Mutti is the German word for ‘mum’, and it’s become an affectionate nickname for my mother, who got married back in the summer of ’69. She wore a white, sleeveless gown, long satin gloves, a deep tan and – of course – pearlescent coral lipstick. Her matron of honour, Peggy, wore the same (sans Priscilla Presley style veil) but in turquoise. And as a wedding gift Peggy gave her a great big soup pot, with royal-blue enamel coating and creamy Bakelite handles. That pot is still in use today, for one purpose: Mutti’s downday soup.
Rich with barley and beef shins, this soup has a sticky, lip-smacking texture that stopped my teeth chattering when shorter days meant it was almost dark coming home late from school. In later years it was frozen into bricks in recycled food containers and sent with me back to university at the end of the weekend. But more than mere physical sustenance, the name reflects its magical ability to lifts spirits, no matter how low.
On wintery Saturdays The Big Blue Pot stands simmering on the stove, steaming up the kitchen windowpanes. I know it well; the chips in the enamel, the small die-cut shape that Mutti pinches to lift the lid, her fingers insulated by a folded tea towel. (Turns out this is not by design but because the matching Bakelite handle kept falling off, so it stayed off.) Mutti soaks, chops, and grates, filling it up as she goes and monitoring the soup level relative to the lip – the pot is an ingredient in its own right.
Long before any actual cooking takes place, she buys a big bunch of soup celery, bends it over leaf to base, and pops it in the freezer. This, she maintains, makes it easier to cut, as it shatters under the serrated knife she loves to use for all her chopping. And although she’s always made it clear cooking is not her favourite pastime, Mutti is very particular about how this soup is cooked. When we made it together, she had no interest in our wooden boards and shiny chef’s knives but arrived with a neatly packed kit of her own utensils.
Between her office job, children, laundry, ironing, and vacuuming the house with Abba on full volume, cooking was something to be dealt with as efficiently as possible so she could move onto things she found more interesting. Like gardening or sewing (cowl-neck numbers for her and granny-print frocks for me) or watching The Thorn Birds or Dallas. This soup allowed her to do just that: it is boiled, all in one pot, not built up in layers of browning and caramelisation.
Mutti can’t fathom why we’re so fascinated with provenance, process, and spending time in the kitchen – there are places to go, people to see over coffee! When she walks into our kitchen to find us lovingly tending a homemade chicken broth, her response is the same: ‘Why don’t you just use a stock cube?’ That’s a conversation for another essay and with Downday I defer to her. So, when she commented (unprompted), ‘That was one of the best’ and concluded that it must have been the especially fragrant soup celery harvested from an organic food garden we visit, it really meant something.
As a child I knew the cooking was nearing completion, when she spooned the beef shins onto the pot lid to break up any not falling apart already. The meat was added back to the pot, but any scooped-out marrow bones stayed behind. The wobbly centres were slipped out, spread onto buttered white-bread toast and shared, with a shake of salt, as a curtain raiser. What started as an impromptu snack turned into something of a ritual that, for me, defines the making.
While the marrow bones add body, the barley and potato thicken the soup as it cooks, so during the simmering there’s a constant adjusting for texture and flavour. Water is added incrementally: too much upfront will make your soup watery; too little and it will turn to stew. If salt is only added at the start, it may be thinned out by water or muffled by potato. For both there’s a constant adding, cooking, tasting, and an art to getting the consistency just right. As is so often the case, there’s nothing like a mother’s touch.
It means the result will never be precisely the same and often when Mutti hands over some of her soup, which we are still very fortunate to receive, she will accompany it with a nod and the confirmation: ‘This is a good one’. As if I might memorise the exact flavour and texture and file it away for the day when I make it on my own, and try to emulate her 50 plus years of experience in balancing salt and water – two compounds as essential to life itself as my mother.
This is the second in a four-part series about salt, seasoning, and the secret to creating satisfying flavour when cooking entirely with vegetables, brought to you with a pinch of nostalgia and plenty of love for the women who raised us. If you missed last week, you can click here to read Brandon’s Essay about salt.
For a video of the making, and the method, click the links below.