Split Pea Soup Smiles

Writing and cooking for my blog began back in 2008 when my co-worker created a tumblr account while I was in a meeting. I suppose Ross believed I should find a place to catalog my stories, meal accounts and leftovers. Tina’s Nom Noms began as a project to build a story/recipe relationship as every meal, at least to me, has a life or lives behind it. The blog provided a space to write a food diary from the heart and it mattered if no one read it - so long as I was creating. It was within this expression that I continued to heal my relationship with food, turning it into the art of not only cooking - but writing and photography. The below post was written 6 years ago, and tonight I’m not feeling the need to rewrite history - but to embrace it.

Rich in memory are those places from the past that can never be revisited. -Rilke

Every Saturday, pretty much religiously, throughout childhood and my more formative teenage years, I would go grocery shopping with my mom and dad. Mom would leave the house to start her day of work at the bakery at 6:30am and got off at 1pm. Full of flour and wearing a Bread Box smock or a John’s Bakery three button polo shirt, depending upon where she worked, she would come barreling out of said bakery bearing loaves of bread, cookies, and my absolute favorite - the concha.  

The concha: A Mexican, shell shaped sweet bread topped with sugar paste. If I only knew then that the concha would shape my life as it known today, but that’s another story.  

The sugar paste of the concha is textured and is of a dough like consistency. It's delicious and crumbly, every bite leaving the gift of sugar flakes in the mouth. And while my father drove all over creation from one end of Brooklyn to the other, I tenderly picked on the one concha my mother would allow me to have on Saturday’s.  One by one, I removed the sugar paste dough patches from the top of the sweet roll my mother gave me.  After 20 minutes, the roll was naked, stripped bare of it’s sugary coating with remnants of sugar deposited in the bottom of the brown paper bag.  I would hold the naked sweet bread and gobble it up in 5 solid bites. After this, nothing remained but the sugar at the bottom of the brown paper bad. And, as we drove, I would lick my finger and take it for a sugar dip until I was done.

There was a lot of driving involved during our Saturday food shopping expeditions.  I didn’t spend much time with my mom and dad during the week between my mom working at the bakery and running to hospital appointments with Thomas; and my dad’s late nights as a truck driver.  I went food shopping because I wanted to be close to them and, of course, the conchas were a bonus. We traveled from the fruit and vegetable stands on Ave. U to 14th Ave. and 18th Ave. to make individual stops for pastas, bread (because we needed more bread) and dad’s coffee.  Queen Ann Ravioli, Pastosa Ravioli - it’s all melded in my mind in one fantastic flour based blur. 

After all of this running around from store to store, climbing in and out of the ‘91 Plymouth Voyager, one lone concha was not holding me over. Shopping with Evelyn was what I imagine shopping with Mussolini would have been like. My mother likes order, routine, lists and getting things done quickly. Climbing in and out of that car and carrying grocery bags in the pouring rain was aerobic and quite athletic for my very tired, very chubby appendages and frame. I realized that grocery shopping was sport for my mother, not leisurely and an act to indulge in, but pure sport and work.

By 3pm it was all over for me. We moved in and out of stores in two hours, weaving, wheeling and my mother meal planning out loud. My mother hadn’t eaten since breakfast at 5:30am and I often wondered, “How does she do this?  She can’t be real, she’s a machine.” She was running on buttered semolina toast and a mug of milk tea for 9.5 hours.   She rarely to never ate during work hours and she didn’t even touch a concha on our car ride from store to store.  I didn’t think this was normal. Honestly,  I still have trouble believing this was normal. My mother worked, and still works, like a machine.  

And just when I would hit my hunger wall, Dad must have hit his too. He would pull into the parking lot at Patrina’s Diner and knew, soon enough, thatI would be sated. Why? Because Saturday was split pea soup day at Patrina’s, and I could taste a cup, or a bowl of pea soup the moment we pulled into that parking lot. I began salivating. My mom, dad and myself, would sit - us 3 - at small table in the center of the diner. I wouldn’t have to withstand mean comments about my weight from my grandfather; we simply ate our prized bowls of Patrina’s pea soup in a silence that was peaceful and almost holy. After this we’d make a few more stops on the way back to Canarsie, then came the next athletic event of hauling the grocery bags up our apartment stairs. I imagined the pea soup gave me special chubby appendage powers to get through to this victory.

Whenever I eat split pea soup, I imagine I’m a kid. Maybe it’s silly, I don’t know, but I imagine myself in a cotton turtleneck, sweatpants and LA Gears - undoubtedly my Saturday best.  The other night, I don’t know, some 35 years later, I sat down to have a bowl of pea soup at my parents kitchen table. So much has changed, but somehow it still felt peaceful, holy and even more special now.

Split Pea Soup

1 bag of green split peas
1 T. olive oil
8 oz. of bacon, ham steak or pancetta, cut into bite sized pieces
2 large onions, diced
2 cloves of garlic, minced
5 medium carrots, cut into small/medium sized rounds
5 stalks of celery, diced
8-10 c. water
3 dried bay leaves
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper 

—Place a large cast iron pot or stock pot over a medium flame and add butter, olive oil and bacon
—Cook for 10 minutes, add onions, carrots and garlic and saute for an additional 10-12 minutes   
—Add peas and coat with vegetables and bacon
—Add water, and bay leaves and bring to a boil, lower heat and let simmer with the cover on until peas are completely broken down - about 1 hour - and add salt and pepper 
—Remove bay leaves upon serving
—Eat with hot, with buttery croutons, in tiny cups, and pretend you’re young again