How to Keep a Letter Warm · Nazar Kalugin
Day 14: Mrs Varga's Soup
Plutarch wrote that a mind is not a jar to be filled, but wood that only needs to be set alight.
Mrs Varga has never read Plutarch, I think, but this evening she said almost the same thing about you.
Dear Grandmother,
Kostya's grandmother came for him at the school gate today, as she does every Thursday, and instead of taking his hand and going, she stood looking at the classroom windows. Then she said, "You are Miss Sorel's granddaughter," not as a question. Dora had told her about the register. In this town, Dora telling one person is the same as ringing the ferry bell.
She asked me to supper. Her kitchen is at the end of the lane by the boat sheds, small and very warm, with a pot already on the stove and a cloth over the bread. Kostya set the table without being asked, which he never does in class, and his grandmother lifted the lid and said, "This is your grandmother's soup. I have made it every winter for fifty-eight years."
It was barley soup. Onion, carrot, a piece of smoked meat on the bone, a bay leaf and a great deal of barley, so thick that the spoon nearly stood up in it. She said that on the coldest days of your winter you cooked it on the classroom stove, in a big enamel pot, starting before the first lesson. By eleven o'clock the whole room smelled of it, and nobody could think about sums. At noon you ladled it into the children's own mugs, because there were not enough bowls. "Some of us had not eaten breakfast," Mrs Varga said, "and she knew which ones, and she never said so. She just gave those children the bottom of the pot, where it is thickest."
I asked what else she remembered. You read aloud every afternoon, one chapter. You let them warm their hands on the stove pipe and told them how a stove works, how air comes in at the bottom and goes up through the fire, and that a fire needs room to breathe as much as it needs wood. "She did not stuff our heads," Mrs Varga said. "She lit them. Then she stood back."
After supper she took me into the pantry and showed me a white enamel pot with a blue rim and a chip on the lid. It is not yours, she said. Yours stayed at the school and was lost long ago. But she bought one just like it the year she married, because she wanted the soup to taste of the right pot. I said that a pot cannot change the taste of soup. She said, "Of course it can," and put the lid back on very gently, and I did not argue.
She gave me soup in a jar to take home, and one piece of advice, which I tried tonight and which you could try too. Barley must soak. The night before, put it in a bowl, cover it with cold water and a cloth, and leave it on the kitchen table. By morning it has nearly doubled, and it cooks in half the time and turns soft and creamy instead of chewy. "Miss Sorel soaked it in the teacher's house," she said, "and carried the bowl across the yard in the dark." I have a bowl soaking now, on your table, in your kitchen.
Barley is one of the oldest grains people have grown. It thickens soup by itself, because as it cooks it lets a soft starch into the water, the way potatoes do if you stir them hard, so it needs no flour and no cream. That is why it was the soup of cold schoolrooms and poor kitchens for so long: a handful of grain, some water and a bone become a meal for many.
When I left, Kostya walked me to the end of the lane with a torch. At the gate he said, very seriously, that his grandmother had cried a little in the pantry while I was putting my coat on. I asked whether she was sad. He thought about it and said, "No. She was full." I walked the rest of the way home with the warm jar inside my coat.
I keep thinking of Plutarch's line and the stove pipe. You were twenty-two and new to all of it, and you already understood that a classroom is like a fire, and that soup can be kindling too. Mrs Varga still keeps the flame you lit, every winter, in a big pot on her stove.
Your Vera
Day 15: A Card for E.
Sappho wrote that someone, she was sure, would remember us, even in another time.
I found the line in a book of old poems my mother gave me years ago, and tonight it seemed to have been written about a recipe card.
Dear Grandmother,
I took the card out of your tin this evening. I have looked at it many times since September, but I had never cooked from it. It sits near the back, between "Apple pie" and "Pickled cucumbers", and it is softer than the others, as if it has been handled more. The corners are round with wear, and there is a faint purple mark on one of them, as if a thumb with plum juice on it once held the card. At the top, in your blue-black ink: "Plum cake — for E."
The recipe is short. Butter and sugar, beaten until pale. Three eggs. Flour, "about two cups (the green cup)". A pinch of salt. Plums, halved and stoned, "as many as the top will hold". Sugar and cinnamon over them. "Hot oven, until it smells done." That is all.
I bought the last plums of the season from the farm stall on the bus road, small dark ones with the bloom still on them. Mila came with Tomas to fetch a book she had left at school, and when she saw the plums she asked if she could help. So she halved them at the kitchen table, very slowly, and took each stone out with a teaspoon, while Tomas sat on the bench by the door and pretended not to watch us. I do not have a green cup. I do not know what "hot" was on your stove. That is the thing about handwritten recipes: they are written for one kitchen and one pair of hands, and everyone after has to guess.
So I tried something, and it worked well enough that I will tell you. Before I started, I filled my own biggest cup with flour, then filled a cup from your old set in the cupboard, the cream one with the chipped handle, and weighed both on the kitchen scale. Yours held less. The green cup was probably small too, so I used a little less flour than I wanted to. You could try this with any old family recipe: find the oldest cup in the house and believe it was the one the writer meant.
When the cake was in the oven, Mila asked why the plums would not sink. I told her what I had read. Heavy fruit sinks in a thin batter because the batter is still runny as it heats, and the fruit drops through it like a spoon through warm honey. A thick, buttery batter like yours holds it up, and plums laid cut side up on the top, pressed in only a little, sit there like stones on a bank. Their juice runs into the cake instead of out of it. Mila wrote "cut side up" on the back of her hand with my pencil, so as not to forget.
It smelled done after forty minutes. The top was purple and gold, and the edges had pulled away from the tin. Tomas ate two pieces standing up and said it was the best thing he had eaten all autumn, then looked embarrassed, as if he had said too much. Mila took a piece home in a napkin for her breakfast.
Before they left, Mila read the card aloud, slowly, one finger under the words, the way we practise in class. She stopped at the top. "Who is E.?" I said it was someone my grandmother liked to bake for. Mila said that her own name begins with M, and that if anyone ever wrote a cake for her, it should be chocolate. Tomas laughed and said he would remember that. Then he helped her into her coat, and after the door closed, mine was the only coat left on the hook.
I do not know who E. is. That is the honest truth. I have an idea, and you would smile at it, or perhaps you would frown. A cake written down "for" someone is a strange kind of letter. It does not say anything. It waits in a tin until someone bakes it again, and then, for an hour, one kitchen smells the way another kitchen once did.
Sappho was right that we are remembered, but I wonder if she knew how. Not only in poems. In green cups and pinches of salt and "until it smells done". There is half a cake on your table under a clean cloth, and the whole house smells of plums.
Your Vera