Dear Ladies of the Pots and Pans,

This morning I am making soup.

Now, soup is sort of a personal thing to us housewives. If I have left over chicken, I make chicken soup. Or whatever. Left over beef? A beef stew. We need to be prudent with what food we have. Let’s try not to waste anything the Lord has given to us and that our husbands have worked for.

Last week, we had a roasted chicken and I have some left. So today, I have cooked the meat off of the bones and I am making chicken vegetable soup. I have some tomato juice that no one is drinking and so I am using that to make the soup look colorful. I also put in broccoli and carrots, so with the white meat, it looks pretty and colorful. Now, the folks here are onion haters… not me but Papa is, and his children follow him. So when I put onions in anything, I leave them in big rings so that the family can eat around them. They like the taste of what onions do for a meal, but they don’t want to eat one. I do the same with green peppers. So my soup is full of onion rings, too. And our family is darned particular about black pepper. It has to be the coarsely ground pepper. And that always makes the soup look pretty, too.

But, as a housewife, my soup is my own creation, made of this and that.

I keep telling Mary, our girl 15, that one of these days, I want to write an article called the Romance of Thrift. Someone already wrote an essay on it, but I can’t remember who it was. I was reading about it once, but never read the essay. But it sounds like a wonderful title for a writing. Because it is romantic to be thrifty… to feed our families our own creations from the money our husbands gave us for groceries. Because, really, it doesn’t matter how much we mothers have to spend on groceries. Mostly, we live on love. The whole family does.

Love can make a soup out of the leftovers in the refrigerator and make it taste like it is fit for a king. The best and most expensive dinner can be served in a house of strife and envy and won’t taste as good as a poor housewife’s hamburger vegetable soup. It’s romantic to have your husband come home to you, his wife, who has flour all over the floor and table, and some on her nose. She is baking his bread and making him a fruit pie. It’s a form of submission to his manliness. It’s a way of building a warm sexual climate for you and your husband. It is a woman waiting on her man and serving him with the fruits of her hands.

My daughter-in-law Alecks, when she cooks, oh mercy! She is a picture of romance. She dances about her kitchen and takes hours to make anything. She wears a long skirt, one of those wrap around gauze type flowered skirts that ties in a knot at the hip. She is Italian. And can she cook! Our son chases her all over the kitchen and hugs and kisses her the whole time she is cooking. He just thinks she is beautiful when she cooks… and she is. I am always barefoot when I cook and Alecks is, too. We can’t cook with shoes on. Alecks says shoes are blindfolds for the feet… and they are, to her and me. One time our son Jimmy tried to tickle her while she was taking something hot from the oven. Oh, he is a character. Boy, she let him have it! Her food is always delicious. But the love she puts into it is what makes it reeeeally good.

Cooking from cans and boxes is ok in a pinch… but it’s far more romantic to cook from scratch.

Love,
Connie