The Lost Soup

Bunia acquired her name in the 1970s. The Polish word for grandma is babcia. Babunia is its diminutive, sweet-sounding form. It was too long for my three-year-old memory though, so she became Bunia, an even sweeter, rainbow-unicorn-with-glitter-on-top version of the word. This was what I continued to call her for ten years.

Whenever Bunia wondered aloud what to prepare for dinner, my response was predictable:

‘Mushroom soup!’

Bunia’s mushroom soup was the ambrosia of my childhood. I haven’t tasted it for years but can remember enough to have no doubts about it.

My wish couldn’t be granted every time. For example, the only soup to be had on Sundays was chicken soup. It was the only dinner choice for a traditional Polish household like ours.

Proudly Polish chicken soup

One chicken carcass without thighs and wings (you can add wings if you like, they taste really good)

Several chicken feet because one little girl really liked chewing on them

One leek

A few small carrots

One parsley root

One half of a celeriac (or a quarter if it’s really large)

Wash all the ingredients carefully, especially the leek. It’s best if they come from your garden, and leeks can gather lots of soil between their leaves as they grow. Peel the carrots, the parsley root and the celeriac. Shove everything into a pot, fill it with water, add some salt and boil. When the carrots become soft, fish out all the vegetables and meat, leaving pure broth. Continue to simmer for a few minutes.

Serve with homemade pasta. You can add a few slices of a boiled carrot if you like. Sprinkle with finely chopped fresh parsley leaves.

Homemade pasta

1 glass of wheat flour

2 eggs

1 big wooden pastry board

1 rolling pin

A knife

Wash your hands. Pour the flour onto the pastry board, creating a gnome-sized hill. Use one hand to create a small depression in the centre of the hill because it is actually a volcano.

I hope the eggs you have are fresh. If unsure, take a tall glass full of cold tap water and put one egg inside. Be careful, you don’t want to crack the shell yet. If the egg stays at the bottom, congratulations! It is as fresh as can be. If it floats somewhere in the middle, no worries, it’s still good to eat. If it bobs to the surface, it belongs in the bin.

Break the eggs and pour their contents into the volcano. Look, we have lava now!

A volcano cannot be left unsupervised in the kitchen, so shove your hands into the flour and start filling the crater. Make sure that there are no lava spills. Mix everything together using your hands to knead the mixture for up to 10-15 minutes. If the dough is too hard you can add some milk or water – not too much, otherwise you will need to add flour again until your dough becomes compact, bouncy and smooth. Cover it with a clean cloth and put away for 30 minutes. It has to rest after all that kneading.

Sprinkle some flour on the pastry board so that your dough doesn’t stick to it. Use a rolling pin to roll the dough out until it becomes a thin sheet. Sprinkle more flour on it before it gets glued to the rolling pin.

Fold your thin dough sheet to form a long log and cut it into thin strips. Spread them a little (a fork does a good job) and let them dry while you boil water in a big pot. Remember to throw a few pinches of salt into the pot. When the water starts boiling, throw your pasta in for 3-10 minutes. Fish one strip out after 3 minutes and have a bite to see if it’s hard enough. If it’s good, it’s good.

I wasn’t a big fan of chicken soup as a kid. I choked on a parsley leaf once and was always wary of it afterwards. However, one big advantage of having chicken soup for dinner was that it could be transformed into tomato soup on the following day. And Bunia’s tomato soup was number two on my personal list of best food ever.

Bunia’s tomato soup

Chicken soup

Several fresh tomatoes from your garden

or homemade passata (you can get it from the store but you won’t get Bunia’s soup then, sorry. We didn’t have passata in socialist era shops. My family were growing our own tomatoes)

Chop the tomatoes finely, then squash them with a fork to make sure the bits aren’t too big because some little girls don’t like tomatoes. But they like tomato soup.

Little girls don’t do logic.

Throw the tomato pulp into the soup and bring it to a boil. Switch the heat off, add salt and pepper to taste. The soup will be tastier if you let it sit for a while before serving. Actually, you can skip pepper. I don’t know any little girls who like it.

To serve, put some homemade pasta into a bowl, add the soup and a generous amount of sour cream. Mix using your spoon to get a nice reddish-pinkish colour with no dollops of cream big enough for little girls to notice and complain about.

What was number one on my best food ever list? Bunia’s mushroom soup, of course. No one else could make it taste that good. All the mushrooms inside it were found in the woods that loomed on the other side of our street. Finely chopped ceps, slippery jacks, bovine boletes, birch boletes and chanterelles were fresh in the autumn, or taken from the home stash of dried mushrooms at any other time. We used no cultivated champignons that the UK stores cheekily label ‘mushrooms’, as if they were the only kind in existence.

The soup could be eaten with potatoes or homemade pasta, and I liked both versions. It always came with sour cream mixed in, which added smoothness to its texture and slight acidity to the taste.

Bunia would bring me my soup in a white or blue enamelled bowl, and I would start jumping and singing as soon as the one-of-a-kind flavour reached my nostrils. My parents were usually at work during the day, so I ate in Bunia’s bedroom while she sipped her tea trying to solve one of her crosswords.

Bunia’s tea

Loose black tea, the cheapest blend you can find. No teabags.

Boiling water

Milk

Sugar

One tea glass

Throw some tea into an old china teapot and fill with boiling water. Leave until the brew turns almost black. Then pour the desired amount into a glass. No cups or mugs allowed! Add boiling water, milk and more sugar than can reasonably dissolve in the glass. 5 or 6 teaspoonfuls should do the job. If prepared right, the layer of sugar should fill one-third of the glass.

The best thing about Bunia’s mushroom miracle was the taste, the second best thing was its thickness. I loved the fact that my spoon could stand upright in the soup, not touching the edges of the bowl.

The problem is that Bunia has never passed her recipe down to me. We were separated forever shortly before my fourteenth birthday, but she stopped cooking long before that time. I was too young to think about preserving her recipes anyway. The thought only occurred to me when it was far too late.

I cannot even remember ever seeing Bunia cook her mushroom soup but it must have been based on chicken broth, the base for many other dishes.

Some experiments were conducted over the years to see if I could emulate Bunia’s masterpiece, but none of them were successful. My mushroom soup is tasty… But it isn’t the same. That special thickness was one of those things I have never managed to get right. Did Bunia thicken the soup with flour? Possibly. The mushrooms probably added some thickness too. Maybe the lack of access to the woods of my childhood is the problem?

Over time, the taste has faded from my memory like so many other things. The only thing I can still remember is that it was the best dish ever made.

My never-good-enough attempt at Bunia’s mushroom soup

Start making chicken soup with vegetables finely chopped. You can add a chunk of beef as well as the chicken meat. Throw in a generous amount of wild forest mushrooms such as ceps, slippery jacks, edible boletes, chanterelles… No champignons! If you only have dried mushrooms, they have to be soaked first.

Boil everything until the vegetables are soft, then add flour to thicken the broth. I like to use semolina instead of flour, but I am sure Bunia didn’t do this. If you want potatoes inside, this is also the time to add them and boil until they become soft.

Take the pot off the heat, add salt and pepper to taste. If you didn’t add potatoes earlier, get some homemade pasta now. Add sour cream to each serving.

Bon appetit or, as we say in Poland: smacznego!