30 Forgotten Soups Farm Kitchens Made From Almost Nothing

30 Forgotten Soups Farm Kitchens Made From Almost Nothing A farm kitchen fed a family all winter on what was left over, and nobody at that table ever called it leftovers. They called it supper, and it came out of one pot. Soup was not a course. It was the answer to a cold house, a thin week, and a bone that still had work left in it. These are thirty of those soups, and the one thing that made each of them work. The pot liquor your grandmother would not let anybody pour down the sink. The corn cobs that carry more flavor than the corn. The soup that is nothing but browned flour and water, and why the browning is the whole secret. The stew that began with squirrel on a hunting trip in eighteen twenty eight. The kettle in Wisconsin that takes two days and feeds a thousand people. And the raw potato that does not fix a salty pot, whatever you were told. Nothing here needs a can, a carton, or an envelope of powder. WHAT I MENTION → Salt in the soaking water does not toughen beans. It softens their skins. What keeps a bean firm is acid, so tomatoes and vinegar go in after the beans are tender. → Most of the sweetness of corn is in the milky starch left on the cob, which is why the stripped cobs went into the milk first. → Milk curdles in tomato soup because the acid meets the protein. Tempering, or a pinch of baking soda in the tomato, prevents it. → A raw potato does not remove salt from a soup. It absorbs salted liquid at the same concentration and leaves the rest as salty as it was. Dilution or added unsalted starch is what works. → Brunswick stew traces to a hunting trip in Brunswick County, Virginia, in eighteen twenty eight, where a camp cook named Jimmy Matthews made a stew of squirrel, onions and stale bread. → Booyah came to northeastern Wisconsin with Belgian families in the eighteen fifties. It is cooked outdoors in special kettles, sometimes over two days, to feed hundreds. → Milk toast was known at lunch counters as graveyard stew. → Cooked food that has sat out more than two hours goes in the trash, and one hour if the kitchen is hot. A deep pot should be divided into shallow containers to cool. SOURCES → America's Test Kitchen, on salted soaks and bean skins → Cook's Illustrated and food science writing on milk, acid and curdling → The Kitchn and other published tests of the potato and salt myth → New Georgia Encyclopedia and What's Cooking America, on the history of Brunswick stew → Wikipedia, on booyah and on rivels → United States Department of Agriculture, on the two hour rule and cooling leftovers Tell me in the comments which soup your family made on a thin week. There is one in every house, and half of what I know came from women telling me theirs. And tell me what part of the country you are writing from. I read every one. Nothing here is lost. Just untaught. #soup #farmhouse #oldways #frugalliving #comfortfood