August 21, 2004
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Sand Soup
Delia asked me to make soup today. Then she got out the big soup pot and started filling it with water. I turned the water off. Delia put the still-frozen meat in the pot and returned it to filling with water. I shut the water off again.
Delia got mad. She yelled at me for shutting the water off. I told her she could see I didn't want the pot filled yet because I had already shut the water off once. She yelled at me some more, then left the house to go to work.
The meat we were using for the soup was beef shank, the big leg bones with hefty muscles. They had been cut with a band saw. The butcher doesn't clean off the fragments of bone after cutting the meat. Delia hadn't either.
After I removed the meat from the pot, I looked inside. There was a surprising amount of grit visible on the bottom of the pot, as if somebody had tossed in a quarter teaspoon of beach sand from a coral beach (sand from a rocky beach or a volcanic beach would have been silicon-based instead of calcium-based, a totally different chemistry). I had to dump the water and rinse the pot. Then I carefully washed the meat, as should have been done initially.
Delia has seen me washing meat before using it on many occasions. I have explained about the gritty pieces of bone left from the butcher sawing it. It isn't a new concept. When I explain it, she accepts the idea of my washing the meat. She just doesn't retain the concept for very long. She would never think to wash the grit off of any meat before using it. Nor will she notice the lack of grittiness in the soup. It won't occur to her.
After washing the meat, I fried it on both sides in olive oil, then placed it in the bottom of the cooking pot. I then fried three onions in the pan I had used for the meat, adding my spices to the onions, finishing by adding enough barley to absorb all of the oil. When the barley was well roasted, I placed that mixture on top of the meat and (Delia would say finally!!!) filled the pot with water and some vinegar. Not only do oil and vinegar together marinate the meat, making it softer, the vinegar extracts calcium from the bones, making the soup tastier and healthier. Then I prepared and added diced potatoes, carrots and celery along with about two tablespoons of pinto beans. Once I got it to boil, I let it simmer for about three hours.
The resulting soup was nearly white and almost thick enough to stand a spoon up in.
