A family memory. Every Saturday until I left home, apart from a few weeks each summer when soup vegetables were unobtainable in the greengrocers, my mum made a vast vat of soup which fed all-comers, with enough leftover for Sunday lunch when it was even better. It was usually followed by freshly baked scones, which were also lovely, but unlike the soup were not so lovely the next day. Indeed by some strange process they transformed into small indigestible organic rocks.
However, on one Saturday when I was very young, excitement over my older brother's newly purchased motorbike resulted in me getting a bowl of my mum's soup pour down my neck and chest necessitating a swift trip to the A&E in the arms of my dad, one of only two times I can remember him holding me.
But so many of my teenage Saturday lunchtimes were made up of coming home from rugby to steep in a hot bath, emerging to an equally hot bowl of soup and a house full of family.
Beef bone steeped from Friday
Boiled with barley, split peas
Lentils and assorted chopped veg.
Luscious, scrumptious Saturday soup,
A steaming, enveloping embrace
Of unverbalised devotion, thickened
with potatoes and white plain bread,
Scalding and scarring when spilled
From the wide-brimmed bowl,
Like the not infrequent flare-ups of rage,
I was plunged beneath cold water,
Baptised in a Belfast sink before
being assured of my father's care
As the car carried me to A & E.
Such memories cannot be recaptured
In a mere recipe.
Selah
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