Soup may be the perfect food. Try leaving some on a neighbor’s stoop.
Sauté an onion, season aggressively and you can’t go wrong.
Photo-illustration by Shayna Rudoren and Samuel Eli Shepherd
By Jodi Rudoren March 21, 2025
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Just before New Year’s, I learned via social media that a casual friend in Montclair — member of our synagogue, dad of a kid in our kids’ grade — was having a recurrence of a rare cancer he thought he’d beaten 17 years before. I texted “hugs” and, a few days later, dropped off a couple quarts of homemade soup. Cauliflower-chickpea-curry, if I remember correctly.
Two weeks later, I left two fresh quarts, maybe mushroom barley, along with some homemade energy bars, on their front steps. Another two weeks, another two quarts. On Feb. 10, my fourth delivery, I texted, “Lentil soup on your stoop, from your favorite soup fairy.”
Yes, dear reader, I gave myself the moniker. In the winter of our discontent, making and delivering soup was a refuge from the dizzying news of Trump 2.0 and the fragile Israel-Hamas ceasefire. Warmth, comfort, consistency, community: the Soup Fairy was who I wanted to be.
Swirling in nostalgia
My earliest soup memory is tomato from a Campbell’s can, served alongside a grilled cheese (American, on white) by my mom on cold Tuesdays and Thursdays, when our grade school let out at 1 p.m. and everyone went home for lunch.
It was my dad who taught me to make soup. He was renowned for offering two soup options at his epic sukkah dinners in the windy cold of New England autumns. Parsnip was his secret ingredient, for both classic chicken soup and thick butternut squash. It’s sweet and nutty, and its starchiness helps thicken the broth.
I think soup is my favorite thing to cook because it’s so forgiving. Especially the ones you blend. Start by sautéing an onion, season aggressively, and it’s hard to go wrong; perfect for the improvisational cook with an unreliable pantry.
Somehow, soup is both humble and impressive. It elongates a dinner party by creating another course — we like to serve small, steaming cups alongside the challah when we have people over for Shabbat. We have these funky-shaped, red-orange-and-gold ceramic ones we bought at a flea market in Turkey; outside, in our own sukkah, we use superhero cups with handles we picked up at a Jerusalem dollar store and ask guests, “Superman or Spiderman?”
Soup freezes well. It works as lunch, dinner, appetizer or snack, in a bowl or mug, with multiple garnishes or standalone. There are endless varieties; you don’t need to follow a recipe. It may just be the perfect food.
Spoonfuls of support
I started bringing soup to other people during the pandemic. As I wrote in this space a few years ago, it made me “feel a little less helpless against the virus — and the hate — swirling endlessly everywhere to sauté an onion in some olive oil at the bottom of my Instant Pot.”
When my dad died in early 2023, an old colleague of my sister showed up at shiva with some delicious lentil that she said was “just for us.” It was exactly what we didn’t know we needed after days of deli platters. I’ve done the same for maybe a dozen mourners since. Whatever your tradition is regarding serving food at shiva, when the crowd dwindles, everyone appreciates a bowl of homemade soup.
I’ve also organized a couple of soup swaps at my synagogue: A bunch of folks make four quarts of their favorite and trade so you end up with four different quarts to sample. And last month, I honchoed the soup making for the “Empty Bowls” fundraiser my daughter ran at our local food pantry, where a ticket bought you homemade soup in a bowl made and donated by a local potter (we ran out of both soup and bowls and netted $3,500).
This Soup Fairy thing with my rare-cancer-recurrence friend, though, is something new — the first time I’ve brought soup repeatedly to the same stoop. Maybe because the situation just seems so cruel.
The dad has a rare cancer called liposarcoma. Seventeen years ago, when our kids were babies, it showed up in the muscle of his leg. This was long before I moved to Montclair; by the time I met the family, he had raised huge sums for cancer research through annual “Cycle for Survival” events.
We orbited the same circles, had a lot of friends in common. I attend an annual holiday brunch with his wife, whose mom is a big Forward fan; I was at their daughter’s bat mitzvah. So when I heard the cancer was back — metastasized in his abdominal cavity — the first batch of soup was a no-brainer.
“We’ll never know everything, we’ll all often be wrong, and sometimes little acts of kindness are all we have.”Mike Birbiglia, comedian
And then I just kept going back. This week, one quart of chicken soup and one of mushroom barley. He’s finished four of five rounds of chemotherapy, and is so far responding well in what his doctor called a “small victory.”
“They will keep going w chemo as long as it continues to work and he continues to tolerate it,” his wife texted. “If the tumors (there are 6) shrink enough, we can hopefully get to the point of removing the rest w surgery. Lots of unknowns.”
Maybe that’s it: lots of unknowns, for cancer patients and their families, and for all of us these days.
I went to see Mike Birbiglia’s new one-man show the other night. It’s funny — and also poignant and insightful and a litle heart-wrenching, as much about his relationships with his dad and his daughter as it is about our broken world.
“We’ll never know everything,” Birbiglia says at the end. “We’ll all often be wrong. And sometimes, small acts of kindness are all we have.”
This Soup Fairy would like to pay him a visit.
Some non-recipe recipes
Cauliflower & Chick Pea: After years of making “Orange Soup” — squash, sweet potato, carrot or some combination thereof — this fills a similar niche but is less sweet and more complex. It starts the same way, with a long sauté of rough chopped onion (you’re gonna purée it later so don’t stress), and includes the same main flavorings — fresh garlic and ginger, copious cumin, turmeric, curry powder, salt, pepper and chile to your taste.
Throw in a head of cauliflower (again, rough chopped), a can of chick peas (with liquid), a little of whatever orange veg you have on hand and a parsnip on behalf of my dad. Cover with veg stock or water or a combo and simmer till everything is super soft. Have at it without your immersion blender — aka soup wand, my fave kitchen tool! — then add a can (not carton) of (unsweetened!) coconut milk, simmer a tad more and adjust seasoning as needed.
Mushroom & Barley: You’re not going to purée this one, so chop the onion — and everything else — smaller and more uniform, the way you’d like to see it on the eventual spoon. Sautée in olive oil while you dice up a carrot or two, celery if you like, and certainly a parsnip if you remembered to pick one up. Throw those in with a lot of sliced mushrooms of any kind, some garlic, dried thyme and rosemary, a few bay leaves.
A splash of red wine, plus a little vinegar — red wine or sherry — is nice here as you cover with stock or water. I also threw some tomato paste into my most recent batch, which added some depth. Probably a cup or a cup and half of barley will be enough for a large pot — the barley will absord more liquid than you’d think, making the soup more like a stew.
Energy bars: This Soup Fairy likes to throw in some baked goodies, and these felt ideal because they’re healthy! It’s an NYT Cooking recipe, super simple and failsafe. I’ve used a mix of prunes, crystallized ginger, apricots, dates and raisins — yum. Also fine to freeze!
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