Close to Nowhere

What kind of soup?

Along with my quilting page, actually an offshoot of that page, I frequent a kitchen and recipe page on Facebook. After all, quilters do have to eat eventually.

Now, I have roughly 200 cookbooks; I’m continually writing my own cookbook and I’m guessing I’ve saved roughly 500 recipes from various places around the Internet.

I love strange recipes – Thai, in fact just about all Asian recipes (except sushi); Mexican, Italian, Southern (do Yankees have “special” recipes?); Greek, French, etc.

I will admit that my favorite recipes and foods are Southern and soul food. Those, to me, are about interchangeable.

I recently found a recipe that fits into several of my favorite categories. It’s a casserole, you use cream of … soup, pasta, cream cheese and spices. Perfect, right?

Well, I laughed at loud at the cream of … soup. Then, I went to my kitchen page and asked if anyone there had ever heard of, seen or tasted this soup. It sure was a new one to me.

I’ve eaten some strange soups. I think peanut soup was perhaps the most difficult to actually try. I did like it though.

Bacon is a food group in and of itself in the South. By itself or with the grease you get after frying, bacon is essential to a lot of Southern and/or soul food. Just try to imagine any kind of beans or turnip greens without bacon and/or grease. Unless of course you are a health conscious type, a vegan or like my grandson-inlaw Tim who can’t eat meat of any kind because of allergies. I feel so sorry for all those people.

My new recipe was hard for me to find all the ingredients – not the pasta, or cream cheese or mozzarella or even the spices.

No, the difficult ingredient was the cream of bacon soup. I was flabbergasted! How could I have lived to be an old lady and not known about cream of bacon soup? Especially in the South?

Some of my kitchen page friends in the North had heard of the soup. Several even found it regularly in the stores. Most of them though were as flabbergasted as I was.

Not available locally, it took me two days to find cream of bacon soup on the Internet. I ended up ordering from eBay, of all places.

And let me tell you, that casserole was excellent! The cream of bacon soup smelled like bacon gravy when I opened the can. And the cup of chopped bacon, along with all the cheeses and pasta, didn’t hurt a single thing.

I’m so sorry that I didn’t discover cream of bacon soup a long, long time ago. Think of all the years I’ve wasted.

Linda Jones of Laws Hill is a former staff writer for The South Reporter. She is retired but continues her weekly column.