Soup Swap? Souptacular!

Founder Knox Gardner points at the National Soup Swap map.

The original soup swap legend starts as follows: “In the dark times of the woolly sweater, nothing warms the soul as much as a bowl of home made soup…” Or, you know, something like that. Though it’s not so much the soul that’s warmed as the heart and the belly.

Soup Swap this year was the largest I’ve ever attended. A whopping 22 soups appeared in the middle of Dave and Carrie’s perfect new kitchen. The swapping was fierce and competitive as well known chefs in our midst delivered bribes of chocolate, tapioca, and impossible to resist home made bread.

The first to go? A bean soup with mint – that of the home made bread accompaniment, the last, an undersold winter vegetable. Awarded the least healthy (but no less delicious for that), a potato cheddar full of yummy fat and carbs. And the least sexy – and most Soviet – the borscht. Our Jewish friends snapped up the borscht, pronto. Carnivores could not resist the magic word “pancetta.” And many were suckered in by warnings of “SPICY!”

There’s an unsolved mystery with this soup swap. I took unbelievable grief one year for showing up with an untested carrot top soup – a soup that has since made it’s presence known in many homes. Some formers swapper – they would not make themselves known – showed up with a container of said carrot top soup, still labeled in my blocky handwriting.

I am snippy about manners lately; my friend Knox will attest to that. I submit that it’s bad manners to show up with soup that is two years old in an attempt to pawn it off on some unsuspecting person. If the swapper of this soup did not like the idea of carrot top soup, perhaps they could have just emptied the container into the recycling.

But they chose to bring it to the swap. Are they holding some sort of grudge against this soup? Is this an cruel attempt to hurt my feelings? Or perhaps it’s a joke, in which case, could they not have made themselves known? Was it hoped that this soup would remain in the spotlight, unclaimed, humiliated? The rejection of this soup made me sad, but also, the public return of it seems contrary to the spirit of the swap, which is to share delicious, carefully made food with friends old and new.

No more time on the soupy black cloud that hovered over me at this event. While I prefer a swap about half this size, it was still wonderful. There was a terrific catered spread of delicious food, freely flowing wine, easily amused children, and a staggering quantity of well made soup to choose from. Our freezer is replete with soup now, some from people we know are excellent home cooks, some from people we don’t know, including the wonderful law school contingent who said this: By eating our soup, you’re making history!

Want to do your own? Check out SoupSwap.Com.