Stone Soup

Start with this......

Start with this……

.....and end up with this.

…..and end up with this.

All last week long, but especially in advance of the Big Storm of November 2, I scrambled around in the garden scooping up odd bits of vegetables: the last couple of broccoli side-shoots from plants I needed to pull out, grabbed all the cabbages to put in the cellar, pulled carrots, and picked anything that I knew would otherwise perish in snow, like tomatoes and peppers. At the end of the effort, like season’s end other years, my kitchen is full of stray vegetables that, were I a more sensible or realistic person, I would give the old heave-ho.

Instead I try to figure out how to use them: skinny leeks that look more like scallions than leeks, bull necked onions that won’t store but surely have some good in them, three legged carrots that are such a pain to peel, tomatoes with squashy spots, you get the picture. Some years, I have made and canned up soup-starter, based largely on gleaned tomatoes, with undersized onions, green beans, peppers, you name it to which I would later add rice, pasta, meat, beans, whatever we felt like having, or could find in the fridge. Actually, if you haven’t got a garden, you probably have a fridge vegetable drawer that offers similar opportunities for gleaning. That’s often where I turn in the dead of winter to make Stone Soup.

Years and years ago, I lived with a young family, took care of the children after school, and made supper each day before the mom came home from work. The children knew the story of stone soup, wherein a traveler stops at a poor woman’s house and weasels dinner out of her with a “magic” stone that he puts into a pot of boiling water. He regales her with stories of the soups he has made for this or that prominent person by the mere addition of an onion, or carrot, or perhaps a potato and so on, until she has scrounged around her kitchen and come up with the ingredients for a fine soup. I think we had a favorite stone that we used for our soup, but the real magic ingredient usually was pasta, because the youngsters would eat almost anything with pasta in it.

This week, my soup started with undersized onions, scrawny leeks, and puny carrots which I chopped up and cooked in olive oil until they were soft. Then I cut up the good parts of two or three tomatoes, chopped and added them. I had leftover gravy from some venison bourguignon and a few tablespoons of cooked rice. In they went. Lastly, I shredded an undeveloped cabbage and put that in. Garlic, oregano, some marjoram to taste, and some salt and pepper finished it.

Wicked good and frugal. And who needs a recipe? I’ll bet a fair number of you make soup the way I do, but if you are under-confident or a beginning soup-maker, believe me, you need a recipe less than a few basic principles of soup making.

It is good to know that the combination of peppers, onions, carrots, celery, and garlic when sautéed together, will always form a flavorful base for your soup. If I did not have leftover gravy, I would have added bouillon, meat or vegetable flavored, stock, or a dab of some kind of leftover sauce, like spaghetti or chili. Anything after that is your call. Bits of meat, especially flavorful stuff like sausage some kind of grain like rice or barley, or small pasta like stars, orzo, or couscous, or potatoes add body to soup. Tomatoes always add a savory element, you don’t need many, and they can be fresh, frozen, or canned. Leafy greens shredded up give us a vegetable shot in the arm, and can include cabbage, kale, chard, or spinach. Your choice of herbs, single ones or a blend, plus salt and pepper will see you through any thin spots in the flavor.

Just remember that almost anything here is optional. If you have no celery (I didn’t), leave it out. If you hate garlic, don’t use it. If you want to make a vegetable soup, leave out the meat. If you need more soup, add water.

Just remember before serving, take out the stone to use another time.
Looking for…..Long Island cheese pumpkin pie. A most interesting query from Donald Curley, for a pie made with Long Island cheese pumpkins. He described his Grandma Curley’s pumpkin pie: “No spices, always a Long Island cheese pumpkin, a creamy filling with dark brown spots on the top skin. The top was similar to an American cheese grilled open face sandwich with a similar type coating. Ours was a poor family, wartime, not much to work with on 3-burner Kerosene stove. I know she used condensed (evaporated?) milk and was encouraged by the enthusiasm of her grandson….Is it possible that you can assist my wife in her efforts to repeat Grandma Curley’s pie?” How about it? Anyone?
Stone Soup
Olive or vegetable oil
1 small stone, optional
1 carrot, chopped
1 onion, chopped
1 pepper, red or green, chopped
1 rib of celery, chopped
1 – 2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 quart of liquid (water, bouillon, sock, or gravy) plus more as needed
Cooked meat or sausage
Additional vegetables (cauliflower, broccoli, turnips, green beans, corn)
Pasta, rice, or barley
Tomatoes, fresh or canned
Herbs to taste (oregano, basil, marjoram, thyme, parsley)
Salt and pepper
Leafy vegetables, shredded (kale, spinach, chard, cabbage)

Put the oil in a soup pot, and the carrot, onion, pepper, celery, and garlic, and cook until they are all tender. Add the liquid plus meat if you use it, additional vegetables, pasta or rice, and tomatoes. Cook until the ingredients are all tender. Add seasonings and taste, then adjust as needed. About fifteen minutes before serving, add the shredded leafy vegetables and cook until they are wilted.

Makes enough for four servings, more or less.

Sandy Oliver

About Sandy Oliver

Sandy Oliver Sandy is a freelance food writer with the column Taste Buds appearing weekly since 2006 in the Bangor Daily News, and regular columns in Maine Boats, Homes, and Harbors magazine and The Working Waterfront. Besides freelance food writing, she is a pioneering food historian beginning her work in 1971 at Mystic Seaport Museum, where she developed a fireplace cooking program in an 1830s house. After moving to Maine in 1988, Sandy wrote, Saltwater Foodways: New Englanders and Their Foods at Sea and Ashore in the 19th Century published in 1995. She is the author of The Food of Colonial and Federal America published in fall of 2005, and Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving History and Recipes from Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie which she co-authored with Kathleen Curtin. She often speaks to historical organizations and food professional groups around the country, organizes historical dinners, and conducts classes and workshops in food history and in sustainable gardening and cooking. Sandy lives on Islesboro, an island in Penobscot where she gardens, preserves, cooks and teaches sustainable lifeways.