Madelyn Hayes
Favorite Dish Essay
English Composition 110 H4
10/4/17
Professor Miller
Christmas, Family, and Meatball Soup
For me, Christmas Day is not just a celebration with friends and family. This day marks the end of laboring over stoves and ovens, and the beginning of reaping the benefits from days of hard work. Every year, my sister, mother and I help my grandmother prepare Christmas dinner. This dinner consists of a range of Italian dishes my grandmother had perfected throughout her childhood. My family has come to rely on these dishes every Christmas to make the dinner truly special, so they are close to the heart of everyone in our family. In this buffet of a Christmas feast, my favorite dish is the one traditionally served first, the meatball soup. The meatball soup is most special to me because I personally help with the preparations. It is also elusive, being made only made once a year, which makes it even more memorable. This simple soup is special to my extended family, as it symbolizes the comfort of family on Christmas Day. I cherish this dish because the preparation is a special moment I get to share with my grandmother every year, as she passes down the soup of her childhood to the next generation.
My grandmother learned how to make the dishes from preparing them with her sisters, not from a cookbook, so she keeps the recipes for the dishes in her memory. Because of this, the only way to learn how to make them is to cook with her. I help her not only to learn the recipe myself, but to ease some of the burden of making the Christmas feast. She barks curt orders at me, to cut up this vegetable or to mince another. In between short orders from an even shorter woman, I can piece together the recipe. We begin with a whole spring chicken, put into a soup pot and boiled. Then, I chop up two stalks of celery, two cups of carrots, frozen tomatoes, and a whole onion, with my grandma hovering over me, making sure each piece is chopped perfectly. We take out the chicken, clean it of the bones, chop it up into bite size pieces, and put it back in the pot. As her little kitchen heats up with steam, I throw open the windows to let the winter air give us some relief. While the chicken is boiling, we make the dough for the meatballs. She softens a loaf of Italian bread by running it under warm water and hands it to me to tear up into tiny pieces, too delicate of a task for arthritic hands. We mix the bread with over a pound of beef, chopped fresh parsley, salt, pepper, Mrs. Dash (a commercial mix of spices), parmesan cheese, and a single jumbo egg. She insists on working the mixture herself, hand churning it in an antique bowl, until it’s thoroughly mixed to her taste. Then, it’s time to begin the process of rolling out the meatballs into penny sized balls. This step is when the family gets involved, as it is too painstaking for a single person to roll all the dough out. To pass the time, we sneak in different shapes, like heart shaped or square meatballs. Whoever gets one of the special shapes in their soup is the lucky one. It’s like finding the figure in your slice of ring shaped fruitcake on Three King’s Day. After what seems like a billion meatballs are rolled out, she bakes them in the oven and tosses them in the simmering pot. Then you add tomato sauce if you’re a serious Italian. On the day we serve the soup, we cook rice, and scoop it into each bowl individually, then ladle the soup on top so the rice doesn’t get too soggy. We hand out the bowls to our guests, finally rewarded from the hours spent together in her cozy kitchen.
Throughout this process, I get to enjoy the company of my grandmother and hear her stories about Christmases past. I enjoy helping my grandmother during this busy time of year, as she has worked so hard to help my parents raise my sister and I. My grandmother has lived with us in a small apartment connected to the house from the time my older sister was born. She has been a third parent to me, always stepping in to help whenever she could. In return, I help her in any way I can. During Christmas, I help her with the decorations. I bring her storage bins up from the basement, hoisting up box after box up the stairs. Her decoration addiction makes the house a Christmas wonderland, every inch decked out in wreaths, Santa figurine, antique caroling dolls, and garland twisted around the banisters. I don’t mind helping, whether it’s with decorations or meatball soup. The time I spend with my grandma has become a Christmas tradition, one that I will fondly look back on as a staple of my childhood.
This dish not only holds significance for me, but it is close to my grandmother’s heart as well. My grandmother lost her mother when she was very young, so Christmas dinner fell to the hands of her and her older sisters. Each was given a dish to prepare: one would make the brojol, another would make the lasagna, and my grandmother would make the meatball soup. Year after year, my grandmother perfected the dish. The soup became my great-grandmother’s legacy, a piece of her mother that my grandmother could preserve. Though she can no longer share it with her mother, she can share her mother’s creation with the next generation. Now, instead of cooking by herself, my grandmother has the help of my sister, my mother and I. We work like a fine tuned machine, churning out dish after dish to make the perfect Christmas feast. Together the four of us make the lasagna, layering stacks of pasta, sauce, meat and cheese in tin pans. We crowd around a table with a bowl of every ingredient, each of us taking control of one layer, so the process takes only a few minutes. We make the brojol, which consists of marinated beef, flattened out and spiced, then rolled and tied like a swiss roll. I help her tie the delicate ropes around the beef, careful to get it to the perfect tightness so the flavor stays intact inside the roll. We make Italian sugar cookies together too, topped with icing and coconut shavings, nuts or sprinkles. There’s the spinach casserole and many more, but my favorite among them is still the meatball soup. The ingredients are simple and wholesome, nothing too fancy or expensive. Yet I cherish it because the process of preparation takes hours, bringing me closer to my grandmother. This time is relaxing and carefree, as we sit around the table, tearing up giant loaves of bread and rolling the dough. You might not think this chore could be relaxing, but I can always count on it to start our holiday celebrations and my stress-free winter break. It’s a mindless task, leaving us the perfect opportunity to catch up from our busy schedules of work and school. With nothing to worry about but rolling little meatballs onto a tin pan, the soft sounds of Elvis’s Christmas album and the scent of pine wafting through the room, the family can finally put aside their problems and spend time together before the chaos of entertaining guests on Christmas Day.
Even before I was involved in making the soup, I remember I loved it just as much as I do now. I recall sitting at the kids table on Christmas Day with my sister and cousins, nursing the soup in an old ceramic soup bowl that Grandma only brings out for the holidays. Surrounded by raucous laughter and banter from my family and cozy Christmas decorations covering every surface, I don’t even notice Massachusetts winter trying to fight its way through cracks in the doors. The soup isn’t just fuel to get me through the day, like cafeteria food. It is made with care and intention, where the cook is thinking lovingly of who is going to eat it as she makes it, every move made to create a more delicious experience. After years of making the dish, my grandma knows every method to use in order to create the perfect soup. Every detail is accounted for, like using a frozen chicken to prevent foam from collecting on top of the soup, and the addition of rice directly into the bowl to keep the rice fresh. It is a long process that displays affection for family, with the passion and dedication reflected into final product. I know I will look back at the times I helped my grandmother with fondness, with the soup a gift that I can pass on to my future family. This dish is so significant to me because every year, I can rely on it to create a wonderful Christmas atmosphere to share with all the people I cherish, just with a simple bowl of meatball soup.
Recipe:
Ingredients:
-one whole frozen spring chicken
-two stalks of celery
-three large carrots
-three frozen tomatoes
-one whole onion
-white rice
-tomato sauce
For the meatballs:
-one pound of beef
-loaf of day old Italian bread
-one jumbo egg
-cup of parmesan cheese
-fresh parsley
-Mrs. Dash, salt and pepper to taste.
Steps:
- Start by boiling the frozen chicken. While that’s boiling, chop up vegetables into bite sized pieces. Add them to the pot.
- When the chicken defrosts in the pot, take it out and chop that up into bite sized pieces. Put it back in the pot and return to low heat.
- With that in the pot, soften the loaf of bread by running it under warm water. Tear it into penny sized pieces.
- Mix the beef with the egg, cheese, torn bread. Add spices and parsley to taste.
- Roll the meatballs into quarter sized balls on cookie sheets. Put in the oven and cook at 400 for around 2o minutes. Add to the pot when done cooking.
- Boil rice. When the soup is finished simmering and ready to be served, scoop rice into individual bowls and pour the soup over.
- Add a splash of tomato sauce and top with more parmesan cheese. Enjoy!
