Making a pot of barley soup and lemon bars

[Marthe48]

My Mom used to make barley soup. Actually, so thick you could it eat it with a fork. She'd make hers with ground beef or leftover pork roast. Mine will be vegetarian, so I can share it with my daughter. Added lots of onion, garlic, a potato, celery leaves, and some cabbage. Spices. Salt and pepper. Already smells good

[niyad]

1. I do a lentil and barley soup with sausage, an old family recipe. Also very thick.

Hmmmm, going to be VERY cold next week. Soup time.

[Pachamama]

2. Yummy

I wish I was at your house for lunch

[Warpy]

3. Call it a pottage, since that's how you're making it

It was standard fare for anybody who wasn't rich enough to afford roasts and varied seasonally, pottage and bread being the standard diet, varied only by bread and cheese, toasted at the fire.

Makes me wish I'd ordered some barley with today's groceries. I have the rest. Maybe I'll do a rich and thick skilly, instead. Sailors and people during WWII in England despised it, it was mostly oatmeal, water, and carrots, nothing else, thin and flavorless. Made with a solid meat stock and with plenty of onions, some garlic, and loads of veg, together with enough oatmeal to make it thick and creamy, it's super comforting in cold weather.

And it's COLD here in the high desert, days in the low 40s, nights in the teens.

[Marthe48]

4. I've read the term pottage

and you could describe my Mom's version of barley soup as pottage. My son-in-law called it gruel. lol Seriously, it is thick enough to eat with a fork. When my Mom made soup, she'd throw all of the leftovers into the pot. And she'd keep adding to the pot for several days. I would eat it when it was fresh, like the first day or so, but then, no thanks. She lived to be 87, so it probably wasn't harmful. :/

[Warpy]

5. And if unexpected company came, she'd water the stew

and call it soup. My grandmother was a bit like that, kept a pot of soup on the stove during the Depression, would dole it out to any hungry hobo who showed up at the back door. If my grandfather wasn't home, the hobo didn't even have to weed the flower beds.

The only soup I ever got was from Mother Campbell, my mother hated to cook.

Pottage in the old days was rather like the Mulligan stew hobos cooked, whatever they had that was ripe or had been culled or intentionally slaughtered went into the pot. During much of the year, it was meat heavy. During Lent, when many female animals were pregnant and meat was off the menu, it was any grain or legume they had left, supplemented with salted and dried fish. Yum. Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot, nine days old--PU! That was how people lived when the good stuff from the fall harvest ran out. Lent just made them feel pious about it.

[Marthe48]

6. My parents owned a grocery store

how ironic She preferred her soup, and my Dad liked beef and potatoes. We always had plenty of fresh meals, leftovers and stuff that came home from the store. Both of them were good cooks, 50s and 60s kinds of meals.

I thought Lent might have come about because of the seasonal ups and downs of crops and larders. I hadn't thought about the pregnant animals, but it makes sense.