Nothing warms the cockles of one’s heart like a steaming bowl of soup on a winter’s day.

Food historians tell us the history of soup is probably as old as the history of cooking. The act of combining various ingredients in a large pot to create a nutritious, filling, easily digested, simple to make and serve food was inevitable.
A Column By Amy Hubbell
My mother was a child of the Depression. Growing up on a farm on the Old Mission peninsula, her family barely had two nickels to rub together. Yet, she always remembers having good food and didn’t go hungry. I’m sure soup played an important role in the family diet.

In our home, soup was something that went along with snow days. Before noon, Mom would go down to the basement freezer and pull out a soup bone that was included in the beef we bought from her brother, my Uncle Ken.

I can still see steam rising from the large silver kettle on the top of the gas stove. Throughout the day, she’d add onions, carrots, celery, tomatoes (which we had canned the previous fall), corn (we had frozen) and green beans. While the items worked in the pot, she’d set to work making homemade bread. Shortly before serving, Mom would cut up cabbage and throw it in the pot – and 15 minutes later the elixir of the Gods could be ladled.

A bowl of her vegetable beef soup and a buttered slice of homemade bread proved the ultimate comfort food on those cold winter days.

In my own little family, my children have grown to expect big things from their mother in the form of soup. Particularly when the easily prepared food items have dwindled and “there’s nothing to eat” in the house.

This winter, in an effort to reduce our consumption of meat and stretch every penny we have, I have turned to the soup pot. And in most cases can claim success and will repeat the effort. Other recipes proved less appetizing and will be removed from by cooking repertoire.

My favorite new soup features garbanzo beans (aka, chickpeas). These golden nuggets are legumes that can be purchased canned but are also available for even less in dried form.

The beans have a nutty flavor and are high in fiber and low in fat. Healthy and cheap. It doesn’t get any better than this.

As with all my kitchen efforts, I refer to recipes but also add complementary ingredients to make the recipe my own. The “budget” cookbook called for the beans, garlic, lemon juice and a diced tomato. I added cumin, tahini paste (sesame seed paste used to make hummus) and sesame oil.

Most soups are better the longer they cook. My concoction was just as good a half-hour into simmering as it was a half-day.

Soup is considered by many to have medicinal qualities. But there two varieties that have the opposite affect on the cook and have been banned from the menu: split pea and French onion soup.

My kitchen offerings were expanded by my Polish exchange students. They come from hardy stock: grandparents who survived World War II and Communism. Their recipes reflect generations of resourceful Poles.

Two of the kids’ favorites are pickle soup —yes, that’s right — and bigos.

One can be produced inexpensively; the other is more costly as it includes meat.

Pickle soup can also be made quickly. Ingredients include grated dill pickles, chicken broth, carrots, potatoes, sour cream, an egg and a little bit of the juice from the pickle jar. It’s tasty, but nothing I would serve to impress.

Bigos, a Polish hunter stew, is not for vegetarians. Served as a “good luck” dish at New Year’s, it was originally only eaten by the aristocracy as they were the only people who could afford meat. In includes sauerkraut, beef stock, onions, garlic, mushrooms, tomatoes, bacon, bay leaves, apples, cooked ham, bacon, smoked ribs and Polish sausage.

Cedar butcher Tom Pleva loves it when I cook bigos as he knows I’ll leave the store with a bagful of meat.
Served with boiled potatoes, sour cream and crusty rye bread, bigos is one of those dishes that gets better the longer the ingredients sit in the pot.

But it will be a while before I put together a big pot of this. At least until after Lent.
That being said, I think I’ll warm up a bowl of the cream of cauliflower soup I made last night.
Soup is good food.