Sunday last I attended the Polish Soup Festival at Holy Cross Church in North Minneapolis. A flier announcing it had circulated in class two weeks prior. Not the most social of beings, no gourmand, and hardly a proponent of extracurricular learning, I passed the flier along, but with a nascent ambivalence because, on the other hand, I do love soup. It’s one of those perfect foods like bread, tea, cheese, and chocolate. One could survive on it alone—and bread—if you had to. I remember eating soup in Poland, chicken and mushroom, familiar yet with a foreign savor, good, original fare, differently spiced, not Campbell’s or Lipton’s. And so, on Sunday evening (w niedziele wieczorem) I found myself descending the steps into a church basement at just about the same time I remembered not having been to confession in over thirty years.
A Polish Catholic church basement, however, is not unlike any other church basement I’ve been in, mostly linoleum, cinderblock, and busy old ladies, a little on the crinkly side, like Dr. Ruth, only very Catholic. Heavens, they’re Catholic, and not just used-to-be, lapsed, but still culturally Catholic, like me. Ahead to the left, a soup queue, no Nazis. Below the dozen or so hand-lettered signs identifying soup entrees stood our servers attired in festive ethnic costume, including red, four-cornered hats with peacock feathers, and armed with ladles. A blue one without the feather, like the one topping Tony Curtis in Taras Bulba, I could don on occasion. Plastic spoon, plastic bowl, zupa.
The chicken noodle, not as pellucid as my grandmother’s—or the bowl I had in Torun on my first trip to Poland—had the effect of recalling her superior efforts, though she would sometimes forego the kluski noodles for store-bought. She also (or was it my mother?) added whole peppercorns to the broth which would ignite under our young, unwitting molars like firecrackers. Until we learned better. Memorable. I passed on the barscz, red beet soup, hot or cold. Never fancied barscz generally. It smells of earth, and not merely earth, but actual soil, and there are reasons we don’t eat dirt. And certainly it is not made tempting by a dollop of sour cream. I’ve never understood the notion of sour cream. If something’s soured, spoiled, you throw it out. Dirt and spoiled milk, Mmmmm. (Mniam in Polish.) I don’t think so. The mushroom with added chive, the vinegary Highlander, the carrot and dill, the lima bean and cabbage, the vegetable, the tomato and rice—all performed their gustatory functions with aplomb but without the magic of transport to Old World Poland. The potato soup, unfortunately, tasted of scorched pan, aluminum, a Silesian ore. The biggest and most pleasant surprise was the hunter soup, a sauerkraut stew called bigos, hearty and flavorful and meaty, whose recipe I’ve acquired and considered adding to my repertoire.
Other men do not live by soup alone, and the entertainment that evening consisted of appeals, some in Polish, for signatures on a petition to the bishop for preserving Holy Cross as a Polish parish. Hard economic times for the Catholic Church have led to mergers and consolidations and threatened the erasure of nationally identified congregations. A younger man, who seemed to be a relatively recent immigrant, though with satisfactory English, pressed me for a signature. Not a member of the parish, I demurred. “But you are Catholic?” he wished to remind me. If by Catholic he meant a long unshriven apostate, then, perhaps, but I didn’t want to get into a theological discussion. It was a long story. Wanting to help the earnest young man, my soupmate offered, “But you’re Polish.” Half-Polish, becoming Polish. I really didn’t want to weigh in on a matter I’d given no thought to. And I’m still enough of a Catholic to suspect that even if my signature might fool the bishop, it wouldn’t fool his Bog. I just came for the soup.
