soup!

Some of you know about my hatred for Honduran soup. It runs deep. It's always eaten on the HOTTEST days of the week, and you have to eat it with your HANDS! I know...soup--with your hands--you must be crazy!

BUT--I'm not the only one who feels this way. My good friend and cohort in the never ending quest to discuss, dissect and generally absorb all that we can regarding Honduran culture wrote a wonderful post about this very topic. Since we helped each other articulate these deep feelings, I feel good about reposting her excellent work. Enjoy.

[Oh, and check her blog. It's good too :) Elise's Blog: A View From Honduras]

I avoid generalizations about Hondurans, since I obviously don't know every single inhabitant of this beautiful land. However, I will take my chances with this one. Hondurans LOVE soup. They are obsessed with soup. Soup is their life blood. Seriously.

Hondurans can wax poetic about the qualities of a bean soup for at least 30 minutes without effort. Recently, a lady stared selling a different type of soup every day at work. We spend most of the lunch hour discussing the qualities of the tortilla soup, and planning which soup they'll order the next day.  

My host mom always tells me excitedly in the morning if she'll be making soup that day, and the whole family joins in the joy about the delicacy. 

I however, don't share these feelings. This is why: 

That's a typical Honduran beef soup. Do you see the CHUNKS of meat, corn, yucca and plantain?!?! That is NOT soup, that is broth with unmanageably large pieces of starch that I have to take extract from the burning broth with my hands, and then try to figure out how to eat without a knife in sight (you shouldn't need a knife to eat soup). 

In my cultural context, you eat soup with a spoon. It's a smooth, creamy, experience, to be eaten with bread and maybe lemonade. It's a great treat on a cold, winter day. 

Here, I am not allowed to eat my soup with bread (it has to be tortillas) and heaven forbid I drink a cold beverage with my soup (hot and cold things can't mix). To add insult to injury, soup is eaten on the hottest days (once again, can't mix hot with cold). 

Finally (I promise, this is the end of my rant), soup broth has so much lard in it, that washing a receptacle that has held soup is a nightmare. I often find myself angrily stabbing at a soup pot with my sponge taking out all my anger at the piece of plantain that I had to eat earlier in the day. 

Now, thankfully Honduras has so many wonderful things, that the difference between my cultural understanding of soup, and a Honduran understanding is minor in the scheme of things.  However, after I come home from a run on a hot day, I must admit, the piping hot seafood soup on the stove makes me want to go running in the opposite direction.