Potato Soup with Grandma
The smell of fresh potato fills my tiny apartment as soon as the soup hits the stove. The grilled cheese browning in the skillet pops and sizzles as the cheese melts and hits the scalding pan, I always burn it. I pour myself a bowl and settle into the lumpy oversized armchair that my old roommate had abandoned with me due to the overwhelming musty smell it was perfumed with. I breath in the mixture of odors that permeate the small space and close my eyes.
I see my grandmother carefully tasting the soup on the stove with an old wooden spoon as she debates whether or not it needs another pinch of this spice or that spice. Grandma didn’t use recipes when she cooked, so every batch turned out just slightly different.
I’m teetering rather haphazardly on a stool that was always nearby for me to climb on and watch her cook. Her masterful hands catch the grilled cheese right as it browns and flip them squarely onto waiting plates.
“Now,” she says to me very seriously. “Any grilled cheese worth eating is cut down the middle like so. That way you can dip it in your soup.”
She smoothly cuts one of the sandwiches with a swift flick of her wrist before handing me the spatula to cut the other. I put all the force my five-year-old self can muster into cutting my sandwich like my grandmother had, of course it ends up being roughly torn and mangled into two far from even halves. Pride floods my body as she marvels at how well I had done and insists on eating my sandwich.
I look at the burnt sandwich I held now, 15 years later, cut only slightly more symmetrically and sigh.
Grandma would always insist that everyone who claims grilled cheese is for tomato soup is crazy, its for potato soup. When I was younger I disagreed and found the lumpy, paste-like soup unappealing. Grandma, who grew up on a small farm during the Great Depression, insisted on making the soup from scratch like she had for her 12 siblings.
I would give anything now to have one of the many bowls of her homemade soup that I threw away as a child.
I dip my grilled cheese in the soup and think about the many shirts I had to change after dripping globs of soup all over them. I look down at the small blotches of creamy soup on my t-shirt. I guess some things don’t change.
Grandma had passed almost 10 years ago. And yet, every time I turn on the stove in my little apartment to make potato soup and a grilled cheese, I am five years old in her kitchen again. Watching her twirl and sing as she makes her soup. My favorite soup.
