generational shift

[adrian_turtle]

Last year, I bought something called a "soup sock," that isn't as silly as it sounds. It's a cheesecloth bag, big enough to hold an entire chicken. If you want to make chicken soup and strain it through cheesecloth for a clear broth, you don't need to pour the pot of soup through a strainer. You can just put the chicken in the cheesecloth bag before cooking it.

They include a recipe in the package, because of course they do. I've kept the recipe card because it IS silly, especially for something called "Mama's Old Fashioned Chicken Soup." It contains a whole chicken, 2 onions, and 2 tablespoons of fresh cracked pepper. So far, so good. It also contains 3 cups of diced celery, and 2 packets of sugar substitute.

It shouldn't feel so very peculiar that "Mama's Old-Fashioned" could refer to a Boomer or Gen-X woman who relies on artificial sweeteners (because she doesn't have a teaspoon of sugar in the house? Because she can't imagine using a half a cup less of celery?) But on the other paw, I know my grandmothers used saccharine tablets everywhere it was appropriate and some places it wasn't, and my mother preferred aspartame. I have cousins-in-law who are already mothers of college students, and they cooked with sucralose for decades, though generally the kind that can replace sugar cup-for-cup.

Comments

[adrian_turtle]

I agree that it could be useful for applesauce. It would probably be good enough for cooking the grapes if I ever get enough for a grape pie.

I don't think sugar belongs in this kind of soup, but I believe it sometimes belongs in other kinds. When my father made tomato soup from the tomatoes in our garden, he added a spoonful of sugar some years and a slug of cider vinegar other years. It depended how sweet the tomatoes were. And there's cabbage soup.

My parents both liked cabbage soup very much, but they disagreed about it so strongly we never had it when I was growing up. My mother's family made a cabbage soup that was very, very, sour. (I think it may have included both vinegar and sauerkraut, as well as cabbage. But I never tasted it.) You had to add sugar at the table, like you add sugar to tea. My father's family's cabbage soup was sweet-and-sour. Again, I never tasted it. I know it had raisins and onion, and I would not be a bit surprised if it had sugar as well.

[kareina]

Having never learned to like vinegar (or wine for that matter), in any form, I never learned the appeal of sweet and sour soups. But I understand how your parents could both feel strongly enough about the one right way to do a certain soup that it was easier to just never make it.