Joie d’Eve: Making Soup for Autumn

A whirlwind month of warm temperatures, chilly college visits, and lots of soup and bread.

In New Orleans, October means … absolutely nothing, weather-wise. It’s still hot outside; the leaves don’t change color; and as we learned in 2020, it is definitely still hurricane season. But for the past several years, I’ve tried my very best to force fall into existence with regular applications of soup and bread.

Soup has been my favorite food since childhood – chicken noodle with crumbled saltines, vegetable beef with chunks of cheddar cheese (a culinary twist courtesy of my Wisconsin-raised mother), gumbo after Thanksgiving, oyster-and-artichoke at Christmas, gazpacho all summer long.

Now, in my own kitchen, I go into a soup frenzy every time the calendar says it’s fall, even if the weather disagrees. I am happy to try to turn almost anything into a soup; I’ve made (with varying degrees of success) buffalo chicken soup, eggplant Parmesan soup, and beef fajita soup. And of course, each family member has a different favorite soup, from broccoli cheddar (Rowan) to minestrone (me) to matzah ball (Georgia).

One thing we all agree on, though, because we are right-thinking people, is that soup is not a complete meal without some accompanying bread to dunk into it, whether that takes the form of soft milk rolls or hard crusty sourdough.

Every autumn, we all share the same delusion that if we are eating soup and bread, it must truly be fall, even if we still have the AC running at its highest setting.

This year, we’ve gotten more than our typical taste of fall weather, though, as we have gone on college visits for Rowan that have taken us to Asheville, North Carolina, and New York City. Navigating hilly campuses and glossy brochures and trying not to compare every dorm room to the one she currently inhabits amidst mountains of laundry, 15 dirty water glasses, Oreo wrappers, and empty Taki bags is a skill I’m still perfecting. It’s impossible to fathom that this time next year, she will be living in one of those dorm rooms … and I will be making soup and bread for one fewer mouth. (Somehow employing synecdoche makes it easier to bear; I can’t fully acknowledge that it will really be for one fewer person.)

The one thing she has been firm on in her college search is that she will attend school in a region that has actual fall – vibrant leaves, frosty mornings, pink cheeks, sweatshirts, apple-picking, bonfires, the whole shebang.

I support her in this quest, although I desperately wish that every region that has actual fall was not quite so far away from me.

As the school year rolls along, I’m trying (again, with varying degrees of success) to embrace this season of transition. Each day of Rowan’s senior year is a blend of the familiar past and the exciting future – one last Spirit Week; one more draft of her college essay – and I’m hanging on to every second with my very fingernails. As I gear up to do the teen years one more time with Georgia and move Rowan into some college dorm room in a faraway city that has real fall, I know these October soup-and-bread nights will become cherished but distant memories. I want to remember to stop and enjoy them while they’re still happening.

So join me in raising your soup bowl in a toast to autumn in all its forms – and to accepting that life is always changing, even if the leaves are not.