Into the Deep Freeze

By Sara Berger

I inherited my mom’s petite frame, her distaste for amaretto flavoring and her penchant for making ridiculously immense quantities of soup. Open either of our freezers and you’ll find row upon row of stacked Tupperware—like we’re preparing for some sort of Armageddon and only we know that soup will save us all.

Inside our well-stocked freezers, frost crystals form along edges of cloudy soup blocks, and nothing is labeled. For most, it would be a guessing game, but I can identify each one: There’s the chicken noodle soup, with its dense matzo balls and bright orange rounds of carrots. Then there’s the minestrone soup, and its twin sister, red chili—look closely for the green leafy kale to tell them apart. And then there is the grande dame of them all: mushroom barley.

It’s my grandma’s recipe. When she passed away at 92, one of my cousins got her gold heart bracelet, and my aunt wears her engagement diamond in a pendant necklace. Of course, jewelry is pretty, but the real gift she left us was her recipes. Specifically, her recipe for mushroom barley soup, simmered with a marrow bone until hauntingly rich and satisfying.

Considering the fact that my diet consisted mainly of buttered noodles and jelly beans when I was little, it seems odd to think that I’d be the first at the table when Grandma made her soup. Being one of eight grandchildren, however, it paid to be aggressive, and I wanted to be sure I got the prize: that marrow bone. Surrounded by the big sounds of family, my grandma would fish out the smooth, hot bone and ladle it with a thunk into my white-and-blue porcelain bowl. Picking up her gift, I’d purse my lips like a kiss to the spongy center and suck that bone dry.

My grandma’s mushroom barley soup took time to prepare, and as she got older, it became too tiring for her to stand at the stove chopping, and stirring, and skimming the fat. She made it less often, and my mom began making it more. The result was a metaphorical passing of the ladle; my mom became the new queen. And in her reign, the unspoken rule was: “Soup forever.”

It was also from them that I learned soup freezes miraculously well —and the freezer made my mom’s rule become reality: we were never without batches of it. She would quadruple every recipe so that whenever a craving arose, we knew exactly where to look.

Even now, one husband, two kids and 20 years later, mushroom barley still reigns supreme in my book. “I made a really good batch last week,” my mom tells me over the Bluetooth in our car as my family and I drive from Chicago to visit my parents’ home in Michigan. She knows that the first thing we’ll do when we stumble stiff-legged out of the car is ransack the kitchen. My kids will stand tippy-toed, uncovering candy from the pantry’s top shelf. My husband will open the refrigerator and dig out the deli turkey. And I will open the freezer, use my ever-knowing eye to scan past the chicken noodle and find the mushroom barley. See, while my own freezer is similarly stocked, I’ve never made my grandma’s mushroom barley. It’s always been her—and my mom’s—gift to me, and I prefer to keep it that way as long as possible.

I heat it up and it smells meaty and earthy and tastes like childhood and home. My mom watches as I eat. “I made it in such a big pot I had to stand on a chair to stir it,” she says without the slightest bit of irony. It’s comical to picture my mom standing on a chair, stirring a giant vat of soup. But the truth is, there is so much love in that mushroom barley there is barely a pot big enough to contain it.

SARA STILLMAN BERGER is a writer and mother living in New York City. Her most recent work has appeared in Martha Stewart Weddings, Brides Magazine, Modern Luxury, The Washington Post and on Scary Mommy.