The tradition of cooking is more appreciated in a traditionally organized societies (Serbia or Vietnam for example) than in the modern western world. I speak in the terms of the eating habits and eating rituals that are getting harder to maintain because we are all too busy.
For somebody like me, who grew up in a traditional society so to speak, soup is considered to be an elixir of life. I remember very clearly the way my grandma (and all other grandmas, I'm very sure) used to make it: it was necessary to put all the vegetable and meat (the parts which contain fat) in the water the day before and to leave it all night to the light fire of the stove; always using a huge pot where I could almost fit myself, with no possibility of making a fire in the house. Honest to be, it was disgusting for me to see wrinkled chicken legs cooked in the soup but I need to admit that they just give special taste to the liquid called soup. Noodles were always added at the end. Homemade noodles was the ingredient which disappeared the first. I'm so glad that even store bought noodles are still in use. When I was little I used to ask for the soup with one kilogram ( 2lb, approximately) of noodles in the soup. Chicken noodle soup is famous worldwide and when serving it in the restaurant I love to hear costumers saying: " It tastes just like grandma's".
My mother doesn't cook the soup all night long but she still wakes up very early every Sunday to make the soup all morning until the noon. I like it hot, straight from the stove. She has learned a lesson from her mother, my grandmother very well. I've worked hard to reach the same taste of mother's soup which would keep me closer to my family however far I am. Soup that I make never takes more than a half an hour of my entire day and my husband often reminds me that I can leave it a little bit longer to boil because he is also craving for the real chicken soup.
Most of the restaurants in New York have different kinds of soup on the menu, especially Vietnamese restaurants. One of my favorite is PHO BO: thinly sliced piece of beef and almost a kilo of noodles are more than enough for a meal. The only thing I don't like in this soup is a cilantro. When I came to US while I was picking up the groceries, I took a cilantro instead of a parsley by mistake. Everything comes here in a size larger than in the rest of the world so I thought it was just a giant parsley. When I tasted the soup which went down the drainer because of cilantro, I realized that I was not going to make the same mistake ever again. In New York is very easy to skip cilantro, I just need to ask the waiter politely to live it out but not in Vietnam. There was a language barrier and no matter how hard Vietnamese tried to understand me and to please me, I still got the soup full of cilantro. It was in a small restaurant on the street with some plastic chairs and some plastic tables in front of the residential house or a building. It looks like everybody's running a restaurant in Vietnam because there's not much investments required. Ever since, I've had a picture of cilantro with me, just in case of misunderstanding. It took some time to remove this ugly plant from my perfect soup especially because it was stuck between the noodles but the soup was perfect.
Once, again in Vietnam, I skipped the touristic area of Ho Chi Minh and got in the narrow streets where locals live. It seemed to me that everybody was taking a nap because the streets were empty. Some people left their doors open so I could see the interior of the house. In most of the lobbies, a motorcycle was parked. I really didn't know where I was heading to when I bumped on a lady who's selling her chicken soup to the locals. Chicken bones were on the ground all over the place. Her pleasant face and her soft voice attracted me more than the soup and I immediately took a seat. Without a single question she poured the soup and I felt as if my mother was pouring the soup to me. She added some side dishes to my soup and I stopped her when she wanted to put the cilantro in. I hadn't even finished it when she gave me a refill.
Honestly, I hadn't expected to find a chicken noodle soup on the other side of the world but that's what traveling is actually all about: discovering the same thing in different surroundings and comparing them with the things we've got used to. The difference that I find makes my life worth living.
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