Connecting with what we consume truly nourishes

There was that morning, last weekend, where I woke up to find the air had a bite in it, that cool kiss of a fully-arrived fall. It was cold in the bedroom, and the keening wind outside suggested it was the sort of day to stay home.

So that morning, I did what one is called to do in such moments, and made soup.

The recipe, copied from a video I’d found online, wasn’t anything fancy. A butternut squash and two bright green apples, roasted until the sugars inside them bubbled up just a little bit brown. An onion, sautéed with dabs of minced garlic and ginger. Coconut milk, stock, and a loose spoonful of cinnamon swirled into the mixture, blooming its fragrance.

In the pot, it looked like an orange mush, and for a moment I doubted myself; but on a spoon, it was heaven.

This was the first time I’d made butternut squash soup — it may, now that I think about it, even be the first time I’ve had it — and this modest success felt like a triumph. It was nothing fancy, but it was another small step in an evolution of how I saw food, one that began during my time away from Winnipeg, when I moved to Ukraine.

Here, an admission: despite being an outwardly functioning adult, I’ve never been much of a cook. For most of my life, the ways that raw ingredients combined to make something new had seemed a mystery, into which some were naturally gifted and others initiated by family experience, growing up with little hands mucking about in family kitchens.

That had not been my story. Like many latchkey kids of the 1980s in North America, I’d been fed on convenience. I was six years old when my parents divorced; after that, my mom lost both her time and interest in cooking. So I grew up on peanut butter sandwiches, Kraft Dinner, Pizza Pops, jarred sauces dumped over spaghetti.

The rest was filled in with fast food, and even as an adult, that accounted for a far larger portion of my diet than I cared to admit. I had tried, over the years, to follow recipes, to watch home chefs on YouTube, but even the ways they moved foods around a frying pan were unfamiliar. After a few burnt or stodgy disasters, I gave up.

So when I arrived in Kyiv for a two-year sabbatical in January 2023, I was presented with a personal sort of challenge. The country’s groceries, though well-stocked, lacked the sheer number of packaged foods I relied on in Canada. There were few prepared pasta sauces, relatively little intended to be thrown in a microwave, and nothing equivalent to Kraft Dinner.

At the same time, I would be without a regular income; I couldn’t afford to lean on take-out and restaurant meals as often as I did at home. So in my free time, when the nights were quiet and there were no bombs, I resolved to learn how to cook — at least, enough to get by without a factory or chef making food for me.

In this, Ukraine proved a gift, and a revelation. Many of my Ukrainian friends, grown up on the simple pleasures of their village grandmother’s garden, had a very different relationship to raw ingredients than I did. Friends ate tomatoes whole, like apples; and of apples, they would wax poetic about varieties from specific trees in the distant family garden.

In autumn, they’d strike out in the forests with buckets to hunt mushrooms, pouncing on big white caps and elegant yellow lysychky — “little foxes,” or chanterelles — like gemstones. When male friends got together to drink vodka, they’d never get pizza or chips; instead, they snacked on juicy orange slices and simple cheese, with bowls of tiny salt-cured fishes.

At the street markets too, an old pride in produce bloomed. On the sidewalks, stout-armed women would hold out samples of their garden’s harvest, extolling the perfect sweetness of tiny violet plums or the ripeness of that day’s cherry tomatoes. I would take these on my tongue, learning to appreciate the subtleties of their flavour.

This appreciation for the origination of food was intoxicating. As a very urban person, I’d spent so much of my life divorced from what grows; and maybe that was why I had found cooking so intimidating. To transform ingredients into a whole, you first have to know and love them just as they came into this world, and that’s what I’d always been missing.

Bit by bit, I started experimenting with new recipes, new techniques, new preparations. The kitchens of my apartments were always basic, so the recipes were too: soups, pan-fried fish, a pan of potatoes, roasted in a simple Soviet-made gas oven. For holidays, I learned how to make holubtsi, Ukrainian cabbage rolls, simmered in tomato sauce and stuffed with beef.

It would be too much to say I fell in love with cooking. Yet to deepen one’s connection with food offers a fresh wonder — and, I realized, a sort of power. When I got back to Canada in late August, the sticker shock of Canadian grocery prices was eased, if not fully erased; at least now, I knew I could enchant my own tastebuds with far cheaper things.

A cheap five-pound sack of potatoes; an onion, carefully selected for its pearly round flesh; a butternut squash, bought on a good sale. I didn’t love those things when I last lived in Canada. Now, I hold each in turn, knowing it needs only a few bucks of any of them to make a blustery fall day inside feel comforting, and warm.

There’s an old song, by the magnificent Canadian singer Hawksley Workman. You and the Candles, it’s called, a romantic ballad of an unnamed apocalypse, an ode to the simple joys that can emerge when the trappings of modern life are stripped away — the electric lights, the cars, the telephones.

“When industry’s fallen, we’ll make our own clothes now,” he sings, in the tune. “The gifts of our hands rise again.”

That line — the gifts of our hands — always stuck with me. Of course, the reality of such a societal rupture would not be quite so romantic, but the tune isn’t supposed to be taken literally. That yearning to appreciate what we make, to connect with the real value of what we consume; that’s the natural tension in a world of convenience.

What I’m saying is: if you have a little time this weekend, make a soup. Try something new. Let me know how it goes.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca