Divine Proportion II: Beef Barley Soup & Heroism in Bag of Chocolate Chips

Good cooking is always a search for balance. A slice of pizza can be beautiful thing – inspiring. Unfortunately, very few slices of the pie rise to that level. Many in fact have certain unpleasant, greasy cardboard like qualities. In all of the Metropolitan Milwaukee’s five counties, with nearly 1.75 million residents, I know of only a handful of restaurants that serve a pizza so beautiful in every way as to bring tears of joy. Those have perfect balance. (They also have a thin, crispy crust which is to my liking. But I digress.)

And so it is with soup. For guidance, there is always the cookbook. And indeed, cookbooks are collections of recipes, which for some reflect perfect balance and divine proportion, and which for most of us are at least acceptable. But in making soup, let a personal vision of perfection with the ingredients at hand be the guide. In time that vision becomes ever more sublime and unique. A soul can take flight in pot of soup.

That’s it, all of it. Lord, I hate to journey into the land of metaphors, but soup craft is simply the art of allowing one’s soul to soar even in the most mundane comings and goings of everyday life. In this case, the mundane is a heel end of roast beef. But the wonder in the possibility of it remains. It’s not so much what it is, but what it could and should be.

In this regard, we are under constant assault. The ubiquitous chocolate chip cookie is a case in point.

For most of us making our way in an urban 21^stCentury environment, the things that naturally delight the soul are filtered out. Our nighttime heavens are obscured in the gauze of our artificially illumined cities. In very real sense that sea of stars for almost all intents and purposes has been murdered. It no longer exists in our day to day experience.

Similarly, at the grocer’s we find many different brands of commercially baked “chocolate chip” cookies. Despite what their packages say and the colorful pictures, none of those are real chocolate chip cookies. They are second and third rate imitations. In total, they are like the light fog that surrounds our cities at night, which gauzes over the truth about the night time sky – that it’s so full of stars as to make us laugh, dance and sing.

All those brands of biscuits claiming to be chocolate chip cookies so dominate our attention that we tend to forget the real thing.   

Should we travel down through Dante’s circles of hell, finally arriving at the bottom of the pit, we would find a magnificently set table with crystal, linen, fine silver and china. There centered on it, and the object of all of its magnificent splendor, we would find a machine wrapped package of machine made chocolate chip cookies.  

A laughing voice would resonate from somewhere out of the surrounding darkness, not a baker’s voice but that of a chemist, “I fooled you, didn’t I.”     

Gary Willis, in explaining Augustine’s notion of evil, wrote: “. . . evil arose from trying to turn these good things from the role God established for them, making them less than they are or should be, less in their being.”

Willis probably did not imagine that he was carrying on about the commercially mixed, baked, packaged, warehoused and shipped, facsimile chocolate chip cookies that land on our grocers’ shelves. But he was.

He goes on: “The extreme side of this is the murderer or the suicide, who literally tries to erase from existence one of God’s creatures – Chesterton called this deserting the flag of Being. Those who “merely” hurt or maim another, physically or psychologically, are doing the same work, only not as thoroughly. They are at war with existence. They serve non-being.”

This of course is not rise the buying a package of ersatz chocolate chip cookies to the moral equivalency of murder. Most things have their place. But when the thought of a chocolate chip cookie naturally drifts to the commercially packaged biscuit, to the exclusion of that creature born in our ovens of sugar, butter, flour, eggs and chocolate, a small murder has been committed.

Sadly, while grocery shopping, for many of us the thought of chocolate chip cookies hovers in a neither world between buying either the economy or the premium brand.

We could instead buy a bag of real chocolate chips, and in doing so open the door to the possibility of creating a real chocolate chip cookie. In that small act, we would of course find ourselves rallying heroically around the flag of Being.

So it is with soup. To be sure the ingredients at hand, like the bag of chocolate chips, are generally not there through serendipity and chance. The left over beef roast, used in this recipe, did not miraculously materialize in my refrigerator as I began thinking about the beef and barley soup. The thought of soup was in my mind as the roast went in the oven.

After a delicious roast beef dinner and any number of sandwiches what remained blossomed with potential to become one of any number of soups, stews or other main courses. One can brood and daydream over a nice heal of leftover roast beef for hours before the final vision for it takes shape.

For this piece of roast, the unfolding vision was a beef barley soup with mushrooms and carrots. (On a different day it might have been a beef soup with noodles, green beans, carrots, and cabbage, or a soup with tomatoes, and a splash of sherry. Or it might not have been soup at all, but a Philly cheese steak sandwich instead.) The leftover roast beef was the only ingredient that took some foresight and preplanning. Everything else are things normally at hand: carrots, onions, barley, broth and etc.

½ Pound of medium rare roast beef cut into ½ inch cubes (2/3 of a pound would be better, ¾ excessive)

1 Onion, baseball sized cut in a ¼ inch dice

1 Celery rib cut in a ¼ inch dice

8 ounces of fresh mushrooms cut into quarters

4 possibly 5 carrots cut into bit sized pieces

1 quart of beef broth, low sodium canned broth will do (homemade would be better, but my sleeves to from time to time are also singed by the fires of hell.)

2 cups of water

2/3 cup of raw barley

Beef base to taste

Onion powder to taste

Garlic powder to taste

Salt & Pepper

In a four of five quart pot combine the beef, broth, barley and water. Bring to a hard boil then reduce to a slowly rolling simmer. After 30 minutes add the mushrooms and vegetables. Continue to cook until are soft then season to taste. Reduce the heat to a simmer just below the boiling point and allow the flavors to develop for another fifteen minutes.

Olga's Ukrainian Borsch: Foresight & Whatever

Olga taught me how to make borsch. I figured she’d know. Ukrainian mother-in-laws should know such things.

It’s bean soup, she said, with beets and cabbage or sauerkraut. If you make it with cabbage add a little vinegar.

What about the stock I asked.

That doesn’t matter, she said, chicken, ham – whatever.

                                                                                                                                                                          

Olga always reduced things to their most basic elements. That borsch was basically bean soup with beets and cabbage is nevertheless enlightening. As is the “and whatever.”

The Joy of Cooking’s take on it goes like this: “There are probably as many versions of borsch as there are Russians.” It opens a wide door for the “and whatever.” Their recipe calls for beef or other stock. It says nothing about beans. And it’s silent on potatoes as well. Some makers of “orthodox” borsch insist on potatoes. (In that regard Rita has “orthodox” leanings that I refuse to give into. Potato soup is something altogether different and I certainly wouldn’t make it with cabbage, unless of course I had leftover corn beef on hand). Borsch is a state mind involving cabbage and beets. It’s not one recipe, but many.

A little foresight mixed with whatever, that’s all of it. That is the joy of cooking reduced to its most basic elements. The recipes here are from notes on dinners I’ve cooked or dishes regularly cooked that result  from a little foresight and whatever. 

All of the almost “meals ready to eat” that have expanded our grocery stores to foot field proportions wage their provocative and relentless war against foresight and whatever.

What’s certain about it though, this soup and all homemade are soup born from a time when one’s super market and the backyard garden were one and the same. Cabbage and beets were crops that stored well – always on hand. After that the other ingredients are “whatever.” The peasant tending his or her garden isn’t thinking about what’s for supper tonight. Their mind is more clearly focused on what shall I eat next winter. And the “whatever” might be a ham shank, a beef shank, or the legs from a tough old stewing chicken. Whatever.

Foresight is the key to a fine pot of borsch. And “whatever” is key to peasant cooking. You will not need to plant a garden for this soup, but you will need to think ahead. The soup is made with things that are always around and are cheap: dried beans, beets, cabbage, an onion, carrots, possibly potatoes and whatever. It’s ever so satisfying and delicious. And with a little foresight it’s quick.

It takes a while to cook up the beans, but how long does it take to cook up vegetables – a half hour maybe.  So it’s the beans that take foresight and planning. A good stock is that way too. It takes a while but is quite manageable if you think about it ahead of time, as in “I think I’ll cook some beans and stock tonight so that I can make some borsch tomorrow.” In that one sweet decision, you will have vanquished the kingdom of food “products,” and will have embarked on the delightful adventures of simple living.

That’s it. The only thing keeping you from a fine pot of borsch is the adult realization that tomorrow evening once again it will be supper time. While tonight’s miserable frozen pizza bakes in the oven, put some dried beans and ham shank to boil for tomorrow.   

You see, the tiny bit of foresight necessary to precook some beans needn’t be an insurmountable roadblock toward making this fine pot of soup.  

For Borsch you will need:

1 cup of dried white beans (Great Northern beans cook faster than navy beans).

1 ham shank about 2 pounds will do.

3 baseball sized beets.

1 large onion.

1/3 head of cabbage shredded.

4 carrots peeled and cut into bite sized pieces.

2 ribs of celery cut into a small dice.

Water about 2 pints.

Allspice and ground cloves to taste (about ¼ teaspoon of each).

1 Bay leaf.

1 teaspoon caraway.

Ham soup base to taste.

Sour Cream for garnish but very important.

While the frozen pizza (or whatever meal “ready to eat”) is in the oven for dinner tonight, add the dried beans, caraway seeds, bay leaf and ham shank to a large pot. Cover generously with water, bring to a hard boil then reduce heat to an ever so slowly rolling boil. Cook for 1 ½ to 2 hours until the ham starts falling from the shank. If the beans have softened in this time it’s okay. If not, don’t worry. In a separate pot, boil the beets for about twenty minutes, drain and reserve in the refrigerator. (Note: They can be peeled and diced into bite sized pieces at this time too.)

Now for the finished soup: Remove the ham shank from the beans, trim off the meat and cut into bite size pieces. If the beans need to cook awhile longer get them going now, bring to a hard boil then reduce the heat to a slow rolling simmer. Once the beans have softened add the diced ham and vegetables, allspice and cloves. Continue to cook for about ½ hour until the vegetables are done. Adjust the seasoning to taste and served garnished with a generous tablespoon to sour cream on top.