I love soup.

One of my early childhood memories is enjoying a bowl of beef barley soup made by my grandmother. I remember her house in the city. It always smelled fresh and clean and a bit like lavender. The kitchen table was brown, and the chairs were a cream vinyl, the counters were arborite and capped with a silver chrome-like edging. It was built in the late 1950s and some of my favourite memories happened there. Especially of food and helping her cook. There were always full cookie jars, home brewed iced tea in the fridge, and homemade food, including the well remembered beef barley soup.

But the soup… I remember coming in the back door of the house after being to the playground with Grandpa, and Gramma having a pot on the stove for us, a plate of sandwiches in the fridge, a pitcher of iced tea awaiting on the table. The whole house smelling of the rich beefy broth. It was never too hot out for a bowl of soup.

Creamy, brothy, thin yet thick, lots of veggies, meat, plenty of barley. Soup! Bring it on. Summer, winter, fall, spring. Soup is a food for all occasions. I love all kinds of soup and make many different kinds regularly.

My family feels differently, and they are wrong. My grandmother moved in with us after my grandfather passed away in 1987. I do not recall pots of pearl barley soup after that. Given my love of all things soup, as I entered adulthood, I decided to try my hand at beef barley soup!

I spent years trying and trying to make just the way my Gramma made it. I wanted to make it like her so I could love it, just like I loved her and the memory of her soup. I even put a call out on Facebook asking, begging, imploring people to share their recipes for this one particular kind of soup so I could try one more time to make it and fall in love all over again. No, this isn’t an ode to soup. It is an ode to the soup I wish I loved.

One friend shared her recipe and I trust her as I know she’s a great cook. With hope in my heart, I tried it. Following the recipe to the letter (something many cooks rarely do) and…

It was awful. Beef barley soup was and is an epic failure. Try it, you might still hate it is my adage. I see it on menus and always get my hopes up… Then I remember – it isn’t the beef or stock that I dislike.

It is the barley. The second and primary ingredient in the soup ruins it every single time. I don’t know what about my memory of my Gramma’s soup that triggers warm fuzzy memories. Perhaps it is the brain of a child that wants to remember the soup as being as amazing as the woman who prepared it for her.

Memory is a funny thing. We can recall something so clearly and be certain of how something is, only to discover that how we remember may not be how it was. Maybe I never liked the soup, but I loved the memory surrounding it. The events and the times when we had the soup. Spending time with my grandparents, playing at the park, lunch at their house, the always full cookie jar, the Lorne Greene animal colour book, and always a new box of crayons. The hugs.

Maybe it was never about the soup.