How making soup, bread and butter got me out of my funk

Daniel Neman, St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Dec 30, 2024

By clicking submit, I authorize Arcamax and its affiliates to: (1) use, sell, and share my information for marketing purposes, including cross-context behavioral advertising, as described in our Privacy Policy , (2) add to information that I provide with other information like interests inferred from web page views, or data lawfully obtained from data brokers, such as past purchase or location data, or publicly available data, (3) contact me or enable others to contact me by email or other means with offers for different types of goods and services, and (4) retain my information while I am engaging with marketing messages that I receive and for a reasonable amount of time thereafter. I understand I can opt out at any time through an email that I receive, or by clicking here

I didn’t actually have to make the butter myself.

The idea started out as a joke, anyway. But the more I thought about it — and I didn’t think about it too long — the better the idea seemed. So I went ahead and made the butter.

It’s easy to do. Maybe not as easy as going to the store and buying butter, which I already had in the fridge anyway, but it’s still pretty easy.

The impulse to make butter came at a time when I was feeling personally dispirited. I have these moments every now and then, when I think about aging and mortality and the prospect of fading into irrelevance.

I was really feeling it recently, as is evident from the original version of my weekly column. A recent column did not end the way I first wrote it. The original ending, which I thought I’d probably delete, reflected this existential despair.

My editor read it and sent me an email that said, and I quote, “Dear god!!!”

Obviously, I needed something to jolt me out of my mood.

Obviously, I needed to cook. And not just something small. I needed to spend the entire day in front of the stove. It’s therapy.

We’ve had some beef bones in the freezer, taking up room until I felt motivated enough to turn them into soup. On this particular day I felt motivated.

I decided to make a beef soup, a standard, ordinary beef soup, with chunks of beef in it and onions, carrots, celery, tomatoes and potatoes. I happened to mention that I’d made it to my mother, and she said, “So it’s beef stew, but with more liquid?”

So it wasn’t terribly ambitious. So what? It was hearty and just what I wanted. Besides, I made my own stock from the bones, and that takes a little bit of effort and considerably more time than I had remembered. I probably hadn’t made it since last winter.

The stock was easy. I simmered the bones in a large pot with water and more carrots, onions and celery, plus peppercorns, garlic, parsley and a fresh bay leaf from my tree that I put in for just 10 minutes — fresh bay leaves are very strong, just as dried bay leaves are basically useless.

I simmered the stock for what turned out to be several hours, and I stood over it for at least the first hour or two, skimming off all the scum that rose to the top. In time, the stock grew darker and darker, and more and more flavorful.

But man cannot live by soup alone, and besides, I needed more cooking to cleanse my soul. So I made the natural accompaniment to beef soup, a loaf of bread.

I have a few go-to breads that I perhaps go to too often, so I determined to make a loaf that I had only made once before, eight years ago. I actually had no recollection of making it until I found an old story I had written about it, but once I read the story I remembered the loaf, sort of.

The Hearty Country Bread requires three different types of flour, and you have to start making it the night before you actually bake it. I made the sponge (a pre-mixture of some of the flour, yeast and water, which greatly enhances the finished product’s flavor) before I went to bed the previous night.

It turned out to make an utterly delicious loaf, one of the best I’ve made in, I guess, eight years.

But you can’t have homemade soup and homemade bread without homemade butter. I’d spent all day in the kitchen already; a few extra minutes wouldn’t do any harm (though I had to go to a store to get the cream, so it was more than a few minutes).

In the past, I’ve always made butter by pouring cream into a blender and whipping it at a fairly high speed until it congeals. Then, I have to spend a pretty fair amount of time pressing on it with a spoon to force out the buttermilk.

But this time, I followed a tip and made it in my stand mixer, which forces out the buttermilk for you. It’s so much faster and easier, but the buttermilk sprays everywhere unless you cover the top of the bowl with a towel.

I covered the top of my bowl with a towel, and the buttermilk still sprayed everywhere. I was too busy laughing to mind cleaning it up.

Dinner was a complete success, and best of all, the process of cooking it soothed me and wiped away my angst like wiping buttermilk off the walls.

There was plenty of food left over, so I brought it into the office for lunch the next day. I brought in the soup, a nice apple for dessert and the butter. But somehow I managed to leave the bread at home.