Soup Carolina Style
Courtesy of the Library Congress
January is soup month; here is a related story. A North Carolinian, my Grandma Duers migrated North around WWII. On a winter day in the 1980s, I entered her apartment and had my first taste of Soup Carolina style. I said, “wow grandma, what’s that?” With a look of pride on her face she said, “It’s soup, do you want some?" I said yes and sat down to a large bowl of lima Bean soup. Grandma seasoned the limas to perfection with them sitting in an almost gravy like soup with some seasoned meat some of it crunchy bits. I asked what kind of meat did she use to season it. “Pig’s ears and pig snot” she replied with a smell. I was shocked because I had never eaten such food before and because grandma had such a bad case of hypertension that her doctor had exile pork from her diet. Grandma grew up eating food seasoned with pork in North Carolina and it was so hard for her to restrain from eating it. She died years after this soup encounter at age 90.
Grandma Duers' North Carolina Lima bean Soup (with vegan translation):
1 chopped onion
1 chopped carrot
½ cup of fresh chopped green pepper
½ cup of fresh chopped red pepper
Pinch of sea salt
Black pepper to taste
2 chopped gloves of garlic
4 medium chopped red potatoes
4 cubes of vegetarian vegetable bouillon
pinch of dried thyme, to taste
pinch cumin, to taste
4 cups of uncooked lima beans (soak them in water over night)
Teaspoon of liquid smoke or smoked paprika powder
2 Old bay leaves
4 pieces of cooked and diced smoked vegetarian bacon (or smoked turkey bacon)
About 10 cups of water.
Instructions
Combine ingredients and cook in a crock in a crackpot on high for about 4 hours or until the lima’s are silky soft. You can also slow cook it on the back of your stove in a soup pot. The soup is even better with a wedge of hot corn bread for sopping the gravy. Looks in the blog archives for stories on corn bread with recipes.
