Some food holidays don’t make a lot of sense to me. For example, National Rhubarb Day came and went a few days ago, on Jan. 23, a date on which no American I know has rhubarb available.
Whoever had the bright idea of naming January National Soup Month was insightful, however. When the air turns cold and the sky turns grey, soup is an ideal food.
It warms and it comforts.
To celebrate this special month, I turned to my own personal soup guru: my friend Pam Gerry, of Charlemont.
Pam has cooked all her life. The oldest of four girls growing up in a household where both parents worked, she was responsible for putting a lot of meals on the table. She added some professional culinary education as a young woman when she worked as a supervisor at Friendly’s in Greenfield.
“They had to train me in all the areas, including cooking,” Pam Gerry told me when I talked to her recently.
In the late 1990s she and her husband, Michael, decided to go into the restaurant business, running the now defunct Buckland Bar and Grill.
The previous owners had closed the restaurant some time before the Gerrys bought it so getting it up and running and finding customers was a task.
“We brought up the good will,” Gerry said. They set out to make their menu as fresh and tasty as possible and drew a sizeable following. “We made everything from scratch,” she elaborated.
From my knowledge of Pam, I would guess that she wowed customers not just with her cooking but also with her personality. She seems to know and be interested in just about everyone in the county. And she is uniformly cheerful and animated.
When photographer Paul Franz was taking the photographs for this article, he told Gerry he generally has to ask his subjects to smile. He noted that he had no need to ask Gerry.
During her time at the Buckland Bar and Grill, Gerry became known for her soups.
“I have so many recipes, we could do a soup cookbook,” she enthused. I have tasted a number of her creations, from her root-vegetable-based autumn bisque to her cheesy broccoli soup to the vegetable-rich recipe below.
After she and her husband left the Bar and Grill, Gerry became a home health-care aide. In fact, I came to know her in that capacity. She took care of my mother, Jan, in the last year of Jan’s life.
I’ll never forget the first time Gerry came to work in our home. Since I knew I had someone to look after my mother, I took off to run errands. I returned home to the sound of giggling. The two had bonded and remained close until my mother’s death.
Gerry found her current line of work almost by accident. A friend who ran a caregiving facility needed a stopgap cook. Gerry took the position and fell in love with elder care. She went on to become a certified nursing assistant.
She still cooks all the time for friends, for family and for her elderly clients.
“I do a lot of cooking for them,” she explained. “I consider myself a good cook, and I just love to share my love of food.”
I asked her about the hallmarks of a good soup. “Make it hearty and flavorful,” she pronounced. “Taste is important. You taste as you cook… You take a recipe and make it your own. That’s the fun of it.”
The recipe below, from her friend Tom DeHoyos, is one she made her own. It features a lovely combination of flavors. Gerry gave me some to try. I savored it, and when I was done, my dog licked the soup bowl for five straight minutes.
In the summer and fall, Gerry prepares the soup with produce from her substantial garden. At this time of year, she uses canned or frozen tomatoes, peppers and corn.
She doesn’t have to worry about purchasing kale, however. Even during Soup Month that vegetable keeps peeking out of the snow in her garden.
6 cups chicken or vegetable stock
2 14.5-ounce cans (or 1 28-ounce can) fire-roasted tomatoes with jalapeños (If you can’t find tomatoes with jalapeños, use two fresh jalapeños, seeded and chopped. And of course if it’s fresh-tomato season you may use fresh tomatoes.)
3 to 4 links Italian sausage, hot or sweet, with casing removed (about 1 pound)
salt and pepper to taste
¼ teaspoon cumin
1 onion, diced
2 carrots, diced
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 small head cabbage, chopped
1 (11- to 16-ounce) can corn, drained, or the kernels from 2 fresh ears (For canned corn Pam Gerry prefers Green Giant white shoepeg corn.)
1 small bunch kale, broken up
In a soup pot, heat the stock and the tomatoes. While they are heating break up the sausage and brown it in a skillet. Remove the sausage from the pan, reserving the fat, and add it to the soup. Stir in the spices.
Sauté the onion, the carrot and the garlic in the sausage fat, and add them to the pot. Stir in the cabbage and the corn. Sauté the kale in the fat until it softens; then add it to the pot as well. Cover the soup and simmer it, covered, for 25 minutes.
Serves eight.
Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning cookbook author. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.