The sweet smell of cabbage soup

Mother was Rose McGone Brown, though her mother also named her Juanita in the terribly errant judgment that Juanita was a well-established Hollywood name that might be lead to stardom if all the planets aligned properly. Probably 1920s cinematic va-va-voom girl Juanita Hansen who had her own trading card picture like Ty Cobb. 

It didn't work. Ultimately, the Juanita Naming Experiment was of no concern because all the generations of my mother’s family held up an Irish Rose as their standard bearer, sometimes several in the same time span. The family cherished that name above all others. It was the family’s signature, ratified by the family home, Rose Hill, Ky.

Rose McGlone Brown’s grandfather came to America from the greenest island on earth with 10 relatives and all that he had earned and owned.

She was a wonder and an empress in her kitchen and grew a family on tightly-trussed beef roasts and chubby potatoes transformed into crispy mahogany treasures. She could make her meals endure and evolve for a week.

And then on some days, some wonderfully amazing days, she would spend the day cooking cabbage soup, and its smell would envelop every corner of the house and, if she weren’t careful, it would circumnavigate the entire neighborhood. And while some sniffed critically at the airborne signal, I did not, for it was the grandest smell I could imagine. Rich and deep and heavy in foretelling and enriched with grease from a large can she guarded near the stove.

While I never knew the components of the soup, it seems upon reconsideration to have contained meat and potatoes and possibly fresh onions from her garden.

Whatever the precise details of its construction, there was no other food that smelled quite as it did. It was the smell of my mother’s kitchen, and I adored it.

And sadly, I grew up to be a man and went away to a man’s life and had no time for cabbage soup and cornbread. And though I always meant to ask for more, please just a little more Momma, time would elude me before I could ask. For what it may say about life’s choices, I never learned to make it for myself or found a companion for whom the idea of Irish cuisine seemed a naturally good idea worth pursuing.

After all, Irish food is much like British cuisine, which is to say, it’s not really cuisine at all. It’s highland camp food in nicer bowls.

Then Momma fell ill, deeply ill, and there would be no more cabbage soup or tightly trussed beef roasts or salty mahogany gravy she could make last a week.

I do not really know the difference between good cabbage soup and bad cabbage soup for I never ate any other but hers. After all, many Irish people believe bagpipes constitute good music. So it might well be that I am saddled with a permanently tin palate.

But, in the end, that makes no difference either.

I still search for homemade cabbage soup and long for its scent upon the evening air because this soup means more than well-flavored broth.

There truly is something of an elixir held inside its rich, thick liquid. Not everyone can taste as I do, for being Irish is sometimes a hard, inexplicable task.

And should it come to pass that anyone would offer me a bowl of the genuine ancient gumbo of my childhood, I would treasure the gift more than anyone can imagine.

For cabbage soup steeped and brewed in the country kitchen of an Irish girl is no small matter.

If you tend to it properly, the smell of cooked cabbage over a slow, blue flame lasts a lifetime.