The thermometer outside the kitchen window said 24 below at 6:40 Tuesday morning. The snow on the back step squeaked under my boots like Styrofoam, and Hank, who is on leash-only potty breaks for another six weeks, went out, did his business and turned around without so much as a sniff at the fence. Smart dog. The big pot of soup had been on the stove since Sunday, and it got us through the whole cold snap.
It's my Grandma Lorraine's wild rice soup. She made it in Mora every winter I can remember, in a chipped enamel pot, and she wrote it on an index card that's now so spotted you can read it better from memory than from the ink. She died in 2021. I make it every January, and this year, with Hank on crate rest after his knee surgery and the whole house holed up, it felt more necessary than usual.
Grandma's soup, more or less
This makes the big pot, about ten servings, which is the point. You eat it for days.
- 1 cup wild rice, rinsed and cooked separately in about 4 cups of water until the grains split open (45 minutes to an hour)
- 6 tablespoons butter
- 1 onion, 2 carrots and 2 celery ribs, diced
- 8 ounces mushrooms, sliced
- 1/2 cup flour
- 6 cups chicken broth
- 2 to 3 cups cooked chicken, shredded (one grocery store rotisserie chicken is plenty)
- 1 1/2 cups half-and-half
- Salt, pepper, a bay leaf and a pinch of nutmeg
Melt the butter in a big pot and soften the vegetables for about ten minutes. Stir in the flour and cook it a couple of minutes so it loses the raw taste. Whisk in the broth slowly so it doesn't lump, add the bay leaf, and simmer until it thickens, about 15 minutes. Add the cooked wild rice and the chicken, then the half-and-half, and heat it gently without letting it boil. Season at the end. It thickens as it sits, so expect to add a splash of broth by day three.
What I've changed
Grandma's card says "1 can cream of mushroom." I love her, and I don't use it. A butter-and-flour base with real mushrooms tastes cleaner and lets me control the salt, which matters when you're eating it four days running. I use half-and-half where she used heavy cream, mostly because that's what's in our fridge, and I add carrots, which she considered fancy. My mom says Grandma would have pretended not to notice.
What I never will
The rice gets cooked separately. Always. Cook wild rice in the soup and it drinks up the broth and turns the whole pot to porridge by morning. I learned that in my first apartment and I have not forgotten. It's Minnesota wild rice, too, never a white-rice blend from a box with a seasoning packet. Grandma bought hers every fall from a man who sold it out of the back of his truck near the gas station in Mora. I buy mine at the grocery store in Cambridge, which she would have called a compromise.
And the pinch of nutmeg stays. Nobody can tell it's there. Everybody can tell when it isn't.
The dog and the soup
Hank is very interested in this soup, and he gets none of it. Onion is on our vet's list of things dogs shouldn't eat, and something this rich isn't what I'd hand a dog who spends his days lying in a pen. While I chop, he gets one raw carrot coin from the pile, dropped through the wire, which he crunches with tremendous ceremony. If you're ever unsure about something from your own kitchen, your vet's office will tell you over the phone. In winter, that's a surprising share of what a front desk does.
Mabel supervised the whole production from the radiator shelf, which is the warmest seat in the house at 24 below. She came down once, for the rotisserie chicken, and was sent back up.
Caleb came in from work every evening this week with frost in his eyebrows and ate two bowls standing at the stove, coat still on. On Thursday the forecast says we'll be back above zero. I'm making a second pot anyway.
