From My Soup Kitchen to Yours - No. 307

Thoughts on soup from Dolly + Melissa Clark’s Lemony White Bean Soup with Turkey & Greens

WHEN TRAVELING ON BOOK TOUR, my mind turns to soup.

Not only is homemade soup comforting and a real treasure to have squirreled away in the freezer so when you arrive home from a trip away you can just reheat and eat, but I can’t escape the stories of Hurricane Helene on my travels and how soup has the power to comfort us.

People in Georgia and South Carolina whom I have met and listened to on this tour have told me of their loss of power, trees down, roads impassable, and all due to Helene. Visit any grocery store in the South and huge bottles of water are still being carted out and heaved in trunks to journey back home. Shelves stocked with canned soup are bare.

For my Greenville, South Carolina, signing, I picked up some essentials—infant diapers—as a donation at M. Judson Booksellers. The downtown bookstore hosting my event staged a community-wide relief drive encouraging those who could afford to buy necessary items for residents without power and essentials to do so.

It made me think of how when things go terribly wrong, tragedy strikes, and we are at our weakest place that warm soup soothes us.

From stone soup to soup kitchens

In Dolly Parton’s childhood in rural East Tennessee, a root vegetable and cabbage soup called Stone Soup comforted.

Southern Living magazine wrote that Parton grew up as one of 12 children in the family’s two-room log cabin in the heart of the Great Smoky Mountains. Her mother Avie Lee’s special vegetable soup with a stone inside was simmered when one of the children needed some TLC.