Aunt Mary’s Soup

Aunt Mary’s Little Old Farmhouse

There’s always a pot of soup on the stove at Shona’s but it didn’t start in mykitchen. It started in a cold little farmhouse in Barnard Castle, England, with a woman barely five feet tall who ran an entire sheep farm on her own.

That was my great-auntie Mary. She was the first relative we visited when my family moved to Northern Ireland and visited England, and she did not disappoint. She’d tell you exactly what she thought of you, usually right away. Aunt Mary was what’s known as a “Geordie”—a word that describes someone who’s tough as nails in that part of the world. She’d been a widow for decades, living alone, raising sheep, and keeping a tiny root vegetable garden just outside her kitchen door. Her house was coal-fired and properly cold, the kind where you could see your breath, with big old hooks still hanging from the ceiling from whatever used to dry there. But it always smelled incredible, because Auntie Mary always had a huge pot of soup going.

Auntie Mary’s soup

It wasn’t complicated. Potatoes, rutabagas, onion, carrot, and a good amount of white pepper, which she was very particular about. She grew nearly all of the ingredients herself, dug straight out of the ground, peeled right there at the counter, and into the pot it went. Us kids just got to run wild while she cooked, and it was a place I never felt freer.

Years later I went back to see her, with my own two kids in tow. Same farmhouse, same rutabagas pulled straight from the dirt, same pot. We sat together while it simmered, and I got to watch my children do what I used to do: run around a cold little stone house that smelled like home.

That’s the soup we make every week, but if feels especially right for fall. Rutabaga, carrot, potato, onion, and white pepper, simmered slow, served with a thick slice of Michelle’s sourdough for dipping. Nothing fancy. Just the kind of food that’s been warming people up for longer than any of us have been alive, made the same humble but comforting way it always was.

— Shona