On one of our many recent snow days I made soup, from scratch.
I started with a chicken. I made up my mind to do this after my daughter and I enjoyed a thrown-together chicken soup using a carton of chicken broth and some lasagna noodles from an open box in the cupboard and whatever else we saw fit to toss into the pot.
It occurred to me that we would get even better soup, and more of it, if I started with a bird. So I went to the store the next day and picked up a chicken, and on a snowy morning, I looked for a recipe on the Internet, finally landing at a site called Pioneer Woman Cooks.
I got a huge description there of how to do the whole process. I made a few adaptations along the way, including a friend’s recommendation to use fresh rosemary in the stock.
My college-age son and I made soup the last couple of times he was home, but each time we didn’t seem to have the seasoning right, so I paid special attention to that part of the recipe. And I was astounded by the amount of salt called for: Lawry’s and Jane’s Krazy Mixed-up Salt and celery salt and all of that on top of Chicken Base, which is surely also salty.
I only had regular old Morton’s salt on hand. And it was a snow day of the serious kind. So I made do. And I put in more salt than I’d ever usually think of doing, right from the beginning.
It made me a little uncomfortable. I grew up in a low-salt household, because my daddy took those little red blood pressure pills, and my mother paid attention to the doctor’s instructions to watch his salt.
I won’t forget her horror when she visited me in my early years of marriage and motherhood. When she saw me put salt in a pot of water I had boiled to cook pasta, the look on her face felt like a slap.
“You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled underfoot.” (Matthew 5:13, NRSV)
When my oldest son was a sitting-up baby, I went out to lunch with my mother-in-law. We set him up in a high chair at the end of our table, and without thinking to ask, she opened a package of crackers — Waverly Wafers, I think — and gave him one. He picked it up and put it in his mouth, and his eyes got wide. It was the first time he had tasted anything really salty. He put his hand out for another.
Salt matters. Oh, yes, there can be too much. There can be. But salt brings out the other flavors and makes everything taste fuller and deeper.
Jesus called on his followers to be salt, reminding them that they already had the characteristics of that simple element used in their culture to preserve and to heal as well as to flavor.
He pushed them out into the world to be good salt, that the world might taste God’s love through their witness. It’s still true for us. We can, by showing love and care to others, make this life better.
On that crazily snowy day, I tasted the stock before I added the carrots and celery and onions to begin making it really soup, and I knew the truth. It needed just a little more.
I poured a little salt into my hand and let it fly into the pot.
And it was good.
The Rev. Martha Spong is the pastor of North Yarmouth Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, and may be reached by e-mail at:
martha.spong@gmail.com
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