Stories Within the Soup
Stories Within the Soup
Grace Chan
I spend an inordinate amount of time stewing over stew.
For context: my undergraduate degree is an individualized study of theatre, education, identity, and food; essentially, I created my own major that studies storytelling through the lens of food. And one of my favourite foods to dissect is soup because it is steeped in a multitude of ingredients, flavours, and narratives.
Let's take the first appearance of soup in the Bible: the story of Esau and Jacob in Genesis 25. If you're familiar with the story, do your best to step away from the Sunday School spiritualization for just a moment.
Esau was a man of the field, a skilled hunter. After a long day of working under the hot sun—mind you, this is the furthest occupational situation from a modern job where the endless terrain is your office, and killing an agile animal is your unpredictable payday—he arrives home to the smell of hot food, prepared by Jacob, his homebody brother.
Jacob did not just cook a regular dinner—he prepared red stew, the stew of Esau's other namesake (Edom, meaning red). Almost as if he knew Esau would be home and hungry at a certain timeframe, Jacob probably planned this meal because a delicious stew takes hours, sometimes days, to prepare, boil and season. Furthermore, there weren't grocery stores back then, so the meat was most likely from Esau's previous hunt.
The starving Esau demands some stew, and like any wise younger sibling would, Jacob counter-demands: "make me a trade: my stew for your rights as the firstborn"
Imagine how foolishly hungry you would have to be to give up all your privilege and future blessings for a meal. Yet, how many of us have gone on an intense hunting trip for the family—before technological advances like binoculars and firearms—only to return home and be taunted by your younger domesticated brother with the ravishing smell of stew? Esau did say he was about to die.
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It is absolutely easy to over-analyse and hyper-moralise this particular exchange in Genesis, especially given the prophetic context of the story. However, skipping to the moral of the story risks losing the human flavours of this moment.
After all, in Robert Farrar Capon's scene of Hell described in his book The Supper of the Lamb, the junior tempter says to the Devil: "I propose that we contrive a systematic substitution of abstractions, diagrams, and spiritualizations for actual beings. Man must be taught to see things as symbols—must be trained to use them for effect, and never for themselves".
Soup and stew are food; and food is food, it is what it is. Food is sustenance. Food is what we have to eat in order to live, breathe, exercise, laugh, work, survive. Food is part of a special category of things without which you will die. Therefore, we, humans, all have an innate, primal relationship to food. And that is the fact of life that helps us connect instantly to this story of Esau and Jacob.
Yet at the same time, food is more than merely food. Stew is more than merely soup, and soup is more than merely boiled flavours ingested to keep you alive. Soup is both soup and, as Capon writes, "living water, water elated to new eminences, water transformed into stock".
Stock is matter. And matter absolutely matters. The food in Genesis 25 doesn't just reveal Esau's short-sighted hunger that led to hating his birthright, but also the moment in which Jacob lived up to his name as a 'deceiver'.
The food you love, hate, prepare, buy, consume, digest, reject and waste is telling of who you are. If I were to get to know you, reader, I would go for a meal with you.
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As a capstone project for my individualized undergraduate study, I needed to present a 'colloquium' which is basically conversing with three faculty members of my choice, armed with a list of 20 books and a 5-10 minute introduction to start the discussion. I could not think of a better conversation starter for my self-made degree than with a homemade meal—so I served my three faculty members my favourite soup.
There is no proper name for my favourite soup, but my family refers to this as 'double boiled soup' for the earthy flavours that warm your soul as if it were boiled twice. The soup consists of lotus root, pork meat (preferably lean meat with bone; I use spare ribs), red dates, peanuts, dried cuttlefish, goji berries, and of course salt. There are no clear instructions for how much you ought to cut up or place into the soup, apart from the assumption that there needs to be enough meat to turn water into soup. Creating the soup is very much an 'eyeball' game based on preference, much like most Chinese cuisine.
As I served the soup to my professors, I told them the story of my family through this dish. I grew up drinking this soup; at every dinner at home, my mother would serve soup with our food like a good Cantonese family. The thing is, my mother isn't Cantonese—she's Hokkien; only Cantonese people are obsessed with soup. Plus, she grew up under-nourished and poor with 6 other siblings, constantly moving from plantations to villages to farms around Malaysia, with an illiterate mother and a truck driver as a father.
On the other hand, my father grew up with two teachers as parents in a tight-knit community in a middle-class village in Malaysia. When they finally met and got married after 7 years of being penpals throughout their journeys to different countries and homes, my Hokkien mother began to adapt to my Cantonese father's household preferences—this was due not only to the fact that Asian families are more patriarchal in nature, but also because he had stronger family traditions from his childhood compared to my mother's transient family life.
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After I was born in Hong Kong, my parents moved back to Malaysia so that I could grow up with a cultural connection to their home country. This was where I began to drink this soup at least once a week, playing a prominent part in our dinner rotation. Out of the repertoire of daily soups that were paired with my meals, this one was easily my favourite.
It was not until after I moved to Beijing in my teens that I began to truly fall in love with the depths contained within this soup. I was desperately homesick for Malaysia, and even though I was Chinese by ethnicity in the capital of China, the foods were not the 'Chinese food’ that I was used to. Even the Cantonese food in China from the Cantonese speaking provinces was not what we grew up with as a family.
Through an unfamiliar place filled with unfamiliar food, I became acutely aware that not only was this soup a source of comfort and nourishment, but it also represented something deeper: a salve for my nostalgia, a taste of my cultural roots, a familial heirloom.
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So much of my story rises like the steam from the bowl of this one kind of soup. Soup is soup—it is what it is, ingredients slowly boiled in water for over hours. Yet soup is far more than just soup—it highlights my privilege as a child that grew up with these healthy ingredients; it shows my mother’s assimilation and upwards mobility from her childhood; it reminds me of my cultural identity in a land when I feel foreign.
This realization was the beginning of my revelation and reverence of Jesus' symbolic choice to use bread and wine as a reminder of His body and His blood: physical food has a way of nudging us about the metaphysical, as if reminding our corporate body leads to a remembrance in the soul.
And as I share this soup to three faculty members, none from Malaysia and all from different walks of life; as its earthy, hearty flavours filled up the small seminar room, I am reminded of how Jesus shared His story: sometimes over the hills to thousands, but most of the time, over dinner tables with friends and strangers.
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The beauty of straddling the line between food-is-food and food-is-more-than-food is this: it's both whole-y food and holy food. The balance is found also in life as a Christian. On one hand we know that this is grape juice (or wine, if you're lucky!) and pieces of cracker, yet on the other hand we know that this is Jesus' body broken and blood poured out for us.
My fascination with food lies not in the new discoveries of fancy cooking or latest fusions of 'exotic' flavours (by whose definition are we labeling 'exotic'?). My fascination with food is the same as Capon's intrigue behind the unassuming process of thickening the sauce in "The Supper of the Lamb": "Yet for all its commonness—or, more accurately, precisely because it is common, it is one of the most deeply satisfying processes of all. Only miracle is plain; it is the ordinary that groans with the unutterable weight of glory".
It is in the ordinary where miracles are. It is in your food where the story of your taste is revealed through the nourishment of the creators and the Creator. It is in the very need of eating matter and stock that we can find God's miracles every single day, from the required lunches and obligatory family dinners, to every covert nibble of an afternoon snack and every satisfying sigh of a midnight supper.
Food reminds us of our shared humanity, because no matter who we are and how full we once were, we always end up hungry. And it is in the shared experience of lacking where we find the common ground of empathy, understanding and forgiveness. Maybe that is why Jesus, the Son of God who lacked nothing, fasted.
Then when we study Scripture through the lens of food, through the famines and feasts, we begin to humanize and relate to the grandiose figures and stories from Sunday School.
One bite could allow sin into the world and alter the entire course of history; Noah's biggest mistake was discovering wine, but Jesus' first miracle was to turn water into wine; Daniel fasted for his righteousness while he was in training to be a government official under a pagan regime; Zaccheus became a changed man after one dinner invite; Peter's impetus to spread the gospels to the Gentiles was through the revelation that all food is clean; Jesus made breakfast after resurrecting the dead.
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Since I can't actually have a meal with you, reader, I invite you to prepare a soup for yourself. Perhaps you'll come to understand Esau's desperation as the smell arrives hours before the fullness of the flavours. Perhaps you'll have a deeper understanding of God's grace that transformed the planner in Jacob from conniving to reconciliation. Perhaps you'll simply have a deeper appreciation of your family, your history, your current circumstances, your passions, your createdness.
After all, there is always room at the dinner table of God. He's waiting with His bread and wine. You just have to make your stew.
Grace Chan
Writer
Photography by Craig Whitehead