Mrs Bailey’s Pioneer Soup

Beans and grains and vegetables and more…

Photo by Yana Gorbunova on Unsplash

Soup! It’s healthful, nutricious, economical, convenient, filling, warming — and, above all, delicious. All of Mars knows this, just as Mars knows that the first colonists never could have survived without it. For many of those early settlers, that first hungry, hopeful, desperate generation, there was little else to eat for weeks, for months on end. Anything and everything might end up in the pot: whatever they could hunt, whatever they could grow, whatever they could carry.

The girls of the Crater School understand this, from Miss Harribeth’s history lessons — but it’s likely they have never quite understood how thin, how sparse of substance and of flavour it could be, what came out of that pot under the name of supper. How could they, when what comes first and delightfully to mind is Mrs Bailey’s Pioneer Soup. Thick with beans and grains and vegetables, redolent with herbs and aromatics, sweetly savoury and above all substantial, it’s fuelled generations of healthy young appetites and sent them forth to their studies and games with renewed vigour and a pleasant, lingering sense of having fed well this day.

[Note: Mrs Bailey’s recipe calls merely for “cooked white beans”. She doesn’t need to specify heirloom beans, because those are what she has by default, by definition. Those…