I admit with no small amount of shame that I belong to a group of people calling themselves “Foodies,” meaning we have a particular interest in food and actively seek it out, as long as it is within our means to do so. However, I hardly ever refer to myself as such, given it is a rather ridiculous title, and besides I have yet to meet someone who fails to meet the requirements to join our ranks. In addition, many of these self-proclaimed Foodies are braggarts and posers, and though I try not to associate myself with them, there is no denying that I am one of them, by definition of their group.
We are vain creatures. We order more than we can possibly hope to finish: just enough to look impressive in the photographs, but far beyond what would comfortably fit in our stomachs. And after we’ve eaten half the customary serving size, we dispose of the rest, for we will also be photographed, and need to look just as skinny and pretty and delectable as the dishes do. Oftentimes any who happen to catch sight of one of us in the middle of the act will first pause to wonder whether the ordering customer was the person sitting at the table, buried under a mountain of jewlery, seemingly more interested in fixing their nails than the food on the table; or if it was actually the garbage bin beside them, whose appreciation for the food was far more apparent.
On one of my frequent excursions in search of new and exciting cuisine, I found myself at a run-down soup restaurant on the side of the road on the way to the next town, where I had planned an elaborate dinner. The ceilings and walls were decorated with flickering lights and holes and paint chips, though the floors and tables were polished and clean. There were no other customers, but the tables were littered with recently used plates and bowls. On the outside, the building was old and decrepit; from the inside, it was vintage and antique.
Behind the counter stood the owner, who was also the chef, waiter and cashier, and in addition made up the entire janitorial team. He introduced himself as a Mr. Langdon, and as I thought about my order he described in great detail how his name and family line could be traced back to the Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower, which was apparently a point of great pride. Apparently, Mr. Langdon was descended from a diverse array of characters, a good proportion of which had been present for or had a hand in the major turning points of American history. His maternal great-grandfather, seven or eight generations removed, was a soup chef who served the American rebels, and was good friends with Crispus Attucks before the latter was shot by one of Mr. Langdon’s paternal ancestors. Then during the War of 1812, a Dr. Langdon worked tirelessly to save his countrymen from disease and injury. However, despite his incredible work ethic Dr. Langdon was an extraordinarily incompetent physician, and by working day and night without rest he contributed over half of all accidental wartime casualties. Between then and the Civil War, there were no particular Langdons of note. But soon after the Civil War ended, then-president Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Langdon, who was better known at the time by his stage name. Just before the first World War the entire Langdon family moved up to Canada, and conveniently returned right as the second one ended – and before he could go on, I settled for the vegetable soup, which was not at all what I wanted, but had decided it was far more important that I stop Mr. Langdon from burdening me any further with his extended family history.
After taking my order Mr. Langdon cheerfully made his way back into the kitchen to prepare my soup. With nothing else to do, and because there was a clear window into the kitchen from my booth, I watched absentmindedly as he chopped and sautéd and blended and simmered, among other such culinary techniques which I do not know the name of. However every so often, in between one step or another, he would pause, pull a large ornate jar from the cupboard beside the stove, reach in and sprinkle what appeared to be a few grains of what appeared to me as a fine grey powder into the developing soup. There was no way for me to tell what the curious substance was; perhaps it was some sort of exotic spice, delicate and luxurious enough to warrant such a beautiful container – or maybe a some sort of secret ingredient, passed down through the Langdons for generations, and had to be stored in a special antique vase – either way, I itched to know what it was.
As soon as Mr. Langdon returned with my bowl I explained to him my observations, and asked to know the identity of the mysterious powder, if it was something he was willing to tell a stranger. Initially he seemed surprised I had been watching him with such interest, and, mildly flattered by my attention towards his work, he complied, though first remarking that the substance in question was something he had received from his late mentor, whose life I needed to hear about first in order to comprehend the nature of the powder and its uses as an ingredient in soup.
Mr. Langdon was taught to cook by the late Chef Strauss, who was a renowned soup chef, but only to those who knew her. She owned a small but well-loved restaurant in one of the many sanctuary cities quickly forming on the American west coast, where she made and served all the soups she inherited from her family in the east. But the harsh truth was that if she had relied on those old family recipes alone her restaurant would have failed in less than a year, for none of the soups passed down in her family were fit for human consumption; the sole exception was a halfway decent recipe for boiled water, which was only cconsidered a soup in some culinary circles.
However, there was an even more damning reason which would at first drive her toward failure: sanctuary cities, like the one Chef Strauss had decided to open her restaurant in, were homes shared by people from all corners of the Earth, and so were able to provide cuisines and flavors from anywhere its residents came from. Just a block away from Chef Strauss’s little eatery, any passers-by could easily find for their lunch Filipino pork adobo, Chinese char siu and roast duck, West African egusi soup, Vietnamese ph?, Korean sundubu-jjigae, Greek gyros, Mexican tacos and tortas, Peruvian ceviche, Thai curry, Japanese curry, Indian curry and dal, Indonesian rendang, Laotian nam khao, Somali bariis, Italian pasta, Polish pierogi and Spanish paella; and they would have only gone around half the block. And so, only a hungry customer with an eccentric and perverse affection for mediocrity would turn away all the great culinary treasures before him, but settle for Chef Strauss’s unseasoned chicken noodle soup.
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And so ended the story of Chef Strauss’s first restaurant, a failure as both a business and a culinary venture. But Chef Strauss refused to give up – no, she was as honest and hardworking and resilient as the good little boys in Sunday school stories, but as stubborn as the devil. And if her goal was to open a successful restaurant, not even God himself could do anything to stop her.
For the next decade Chef Strauss trained under all the chefs who drove her restaurant to ruin. For her, the entire city was a culinary school, and each restaurant a classroom. From sunrise to sunset she took shifts at every eatery, bistro, cafeteria she laid eyes upon; some say if you even made a noise in your kitchen loud enough for her to hear, you would find her knocking at your door asking to watch you cook in hopes of learning something new.
When she finally reopened her restaurant, the streets were lined with customers waiting to try her soups. Of course, half the reason for her newfound success was that due to her work, she was now good friends with nearly all those worth mentioning in the city’s food industry, and they had all come together to help her with advertising. However, advertising and renown mean nothing without the backing of a quality product, and all of Chef Strauss’s accumulated effort had finally bore fruit. No longer was she burdened by the culinary misdeeds her kin had forced upon her. For the past decade she had been a sponge, soaking up all she saw and learned from every corner of the city which would avail to her its secrets. With her newfound knowledge she transformed her old family recipes, infusing her soups with all the flavors and spices she’d tasted and studied, now cooking as differently in the kitchen as an artist would paint after discovering a world of color beyond a greyscale palette.
It was only later – far later, when she finally met and decided to take on Mr. Langdon as an apprentice. By this time she had become renowned, at the very least within the city limits, as a premier soup chef. Many of those who knew her went as far as to say she was the embodiment of soup itself; they said her sweat was made of savory chicken broth, and her tears were made of beef stock, and some even spread rumors that her dandruff was made of salt and onion powder. However, she repeatedly refused any expansions or renovations, and her restaurant remained a small hole-in-the-wall. If it’s good enough for everyone else on the block, then it’s good enough for me, she’d say.
Mr. Langdon wasn’t her only trainee. Having attributed her success to all those willing to take her under their wing and share their secrets with an outsider – though of course there were no outsiders in a sanctuary city – she felt the need to pass her gifts on to whoever sought them out, and took on as many apprentices as she had the energy to teach. However, Mr. Langdon was by far the most gifted of them all (this I took with a grain of salt given he was the one telling the story), and the one who knew her best as she neared her deathbed.
Mr. Langdon was the first person whom she told what she wished would be done with her remains. She had spent a lifetime slaving before the stove, boiling and reducing and braising and sautéing and seasoning and simmering; it was only right that at the time of her passing, she should suffer the same fate. And so after her memorial, all those who loved her and her soups watched as Chef Strauss’s remains were cremated, and her ashes were added to an immense pot of boiling water. One by one, they lined up before the pot, each holding a ladle brought from home, ready to taste the great chef’s very last soup – and so ends the story of Chef Strauss.
But what nobody at the time thought appropriate to mention, given the tone of the ongoing proceedings, how good the broth tasted, and how much they enjoyed it. Perhaps there was some truth to all those rumors, after all; for even her ashes were a first-rate soup stock. It was somehow smoky, but not in the same way as salmon or brisket; it somehow tasted burnt, with all the fragrance of a well-done char but none of the bitterness; and under it all was a subtle aroma carried by all the flavors the chef had used and learned over the course of her life.
But most alarming of all was something only Mr. Langdon knew, but kept to himself: he did not use all of his mentor’s ashes. He had reserved a small portion in an urn, just to remember her by, but having experienced its potential as a spice, he could not help but continue to add a dash or two of Chef Strauss to his own meals. Before long, he was adding bits of Chef Strauss to his customers’ soups as well, for her flavor turned first-time customers into regulars, and gave regulars all the more reason to keep coming back. And though it had been ages now since she passed, Mr. Langdon never took her gift for granted, for mentorship is a gift that keeps on giving, and sustains the receiver far beyond the duration of the giver.
As Mr. Langdon finished his story, I had also finished my soup. It was as he had said: though Mr. Langdon looked like an amateur, the bowl before me had been filled with no ordinary bouillon. As much as I was horrified at what I had just eaten, I soon discovered within me a quickly growing hankering for more, which I had never before felt after eating vegetable soup. I came to the conclusion, therefore, that this insatiety must have come from what little of the late Chef Strauss I had consumed, especially given the unprecedented nature of this strange hankering meant it had not arisen from the vegetables or water or any other normal ingredients in the soup.
It was only with great strength of will that I resisted the urge to ask for another bowl. I was unable to tell whether it was disgust or horror I felt, and whether this feeling was directed at the soup, for its contents; or at myself, for even entertaining the idea of wanting more. In either case, it was clear to me that being near Mr. Langdon would do me no good.
Standing up from my seat, I politely excused myself and asked to use the men’s toilet, which Mr. Langdon had said was right behind the kitchen. As I approached the kitchen I caught a brief whiff of the aroma coming from whatever was left over of my vegetable soup in a large pot on his stove. I still remember it clearly: the scent of his odious spice was intoxicating, all other smells paling in comparison. It was as if the Chef were standing there herself; I could almost smell her perfume, her sweat from hours working over the hot stove. She worked the pots and pans and stirring-spoons and knives and ladles, cooking up soups which Mr. Langdon could never hope to make alone, and with a level of skill Mr. Langdon could never hope to achieve by himself.
And I think I would have walked in and approached her, if my absentminded staring hadn’t caught Mr. Langdon’s eye. But instead I quickly made my way into the restroom, and as soon as I locked the door, I forced my way out through the restroom window, glad to have found a timely escape.
