The Soup Pot Vigil

On the winter solstice every year, I prepare my mother’s lentil soup. Not during a gathering, not for guests. For me alone, during the hours where darkness stakes out the longest land-grab of the year.

This wasn't always a ritual. The first three winters she was gone, I couldn’t bring myself to open her recipe box. It went on my kitchen shelf, a small wooden coffin of index cards scrawled in her sloping handwriting, each one a voice I could no longer hear unless it was on paper. The recipes read like seances I wasn’t prepared to conduct.

But then, on the fourth winter solstice, the one with the shortest day and longest night, I woke up to an apartment so cold I could see my breath. The radiator had failed some time in the previous night, and the landlord wouldn’t arrive until morning. I tugged on two sweaters, snuggled myself in a blanket and stood shivering in my kitchen as faint December light fought its way through the window.

I needed warmth. Not heat, but warmth — the kind that fills a body from the inside.

I opened the recipe box.

One of her lentil soup cards was near the front, splattered with old stains and softened at the corners from handling. The ingredients were simple — onions, carrots, celery, garlic, red lentils, cumin, a bay leaf and lemon juice at the end. But in the margins, she’d jotted down notes: *Don’t rush the onions. Let them go golden. This is where the taste resides. *

I began to chop.

The ritual announces itself slowly. You don’t think of it as ritual to start with — just as something you have to do, if you’re going to get by. But the knife gets its rhythm on the cutting board, and the onions let off that sharp smell, and suddenly you’re twelve years old again, standing on a step stool next to your mother trying to learn the difference between dicing and mincing, trying to learn that cooking is a practice in patience.

I poured oil into her old soup pot — the heavy one with the copper bottom she’d purchased before I was born. I was freezing there in my apartment, but my hands were toasty from the effort. I added the onions and I heard them sizzle, saw them gradually yield their opacity to gold.

Don't rush the onions.

Outdoors, the solstice light was already fading though it was barely 3 p.m. That’s what winter does — it squeezes time, makes the darkness generous and the light mean. Winter was when the world turned inward, my mother liked to say, when everything that lived curled tighter and closer to its most elemental self and rested.

I stirred in the carrots and celery, then the garlic. The smell changed, deepened. I shifted, and listened to the scrape of the wooden spoon against the bottom of the pot — that sound I heard a thousand times in my childhood kitchen, comfort’s timpani.

The cumin went in next. My mother had taught me to toast spices first, to wake them up, she told me. I never knew what she was talking about until I did it myself and smelled the way that the cumin changed in the heat, how it opened up like a door into some warmer geography, some world where winter had become just a rumour.

I narrated myself into adding the lentils, the broth, the bay leaf. I boiled it and reduced its heat to a simmer. And then there was the most important part: waiting.

A soup is not a soup until it has had time to think, my mother used to say. Until all the elements have had a chance to meet each other, to swap flavours, to become something they were not alone.

I dragged a chair over by the stove and sat, blanket around my shoulders, staring at the pot. The ornamental curls of steam rose and filled the room with warm air. The windows fogged. The apartment took on the smell of its owner’s home — not this apartment, but the concept of home; its memory.

This is when the ceremony really starts. Not in the chopping or the stirring, but in the sitting. In the vigil.

I watch my mother’s soup on the longest night of the year. I don’t read or scroll through my phone or distract myself. I just sit and mind the pot, turning the heat up or down, giving an occasional stir and watching as they dissolve into blissful softness. It is forty-five minutes, approximately, but time works differently in the vigil. Minutes stretch and darken like the night outside.

My mother made this soup every winter, loads of dozens of times. How her hands went through these same motions, how she stood in her own kitchen and watched her pot and thought what must have been the same thoughts while the shortest day hit up against the longest night.

I consider the solstice itself — that turning point, that moment of most darkness before the light starts slinking back. If ever ancient people must have built fires on this night, they must have required evidence that warmth and brightness weren’t gone forever. Oh, how they must have needed ritual to carry them through the dark.

Once the lentils have softened, I stir in the lemon juice — my mother’s secret, something in its brightness that lifts every dish. I taste, add more salt, taste again. The soup is ready.

I could eat it immediately. But I don't. So I don’t pour it into a Thermos and sip it at my desk with Maldon salt sprinkles, the way the chic digs in their PJs do as they scroll through Instagram instead of working here”; When the very sight of your face is enough to make me look on the bright side “Instead, I spoon some out into my mother’s old blue bowl — you know, that one with the chip on its rim; and Out onto my table in my small apartment room for me and I eat it slowly, determinedly while winter dark presses against windows.

The soup is perfect. It's always perfect. Not because I’m such an ace in the kitchen, but because the recipe is fool proof, and my mother knew what she was doing when she wrote it down one afternoon, with me beside her — or even if I wasn’t there at all. I always knew you’d need this.

With seven years of this ritual behind me, I now understand that I am not only making soup. I'm making contact. With her, yes, but also with me — the part of me that is still her daughter, the part of me who will still need her presence in the cold season most of all. The soup pot is a medium, the kitchen is a chapel; the solstice, my holy day.

When I’m done eating, I divide the rest among containers. It’s too much for any one person, and I think it was meant to be. My mother’s recipes were meant for plenty, for others. So I take tureens of it to my neighbours — the elderly woman upstairs, the young couple next door, graduate student in the basement apartment who is thousands of miles from his family.

“Solstice soup,” I say to the hosts, and they look perplexed but grateful.

This, too, has joined in the ritual: the sharing of warmth. My mother would approve.

Later, on my own again, I wash the soup pot in hot water, dry it meticulously, hide it away. There’s still cumin and lemongrass in the kitchen. My apartment has finally warmed. Outside, the longest night grinds into a slow arc, and I am prepared for it now. Fed. Fortified. Connected.

Next month, little by little, minute by minute, the light will return. Spring will eventually come. But for now, in the depths of winter, I have this: a recipe, a ritual, a mode of recollection that is also a process of being recalled.

My mother resides in this soup pot. She resides in the margin notes, in the toasted cumin, in the patience it requires to let onions go golden. She lives in the act of sitting vigil over something as basic and crucial as a pot of lentils on the longest night of the year.

And I live there too — in the follow-through of her gesture, in the decision to generate warmth when the world is cold, in faith that ritual cannot be only a backward-looking glance but also an exercise in making light to carry into uncharted places.

Every year on the winter solstice I prepare my mother’s lentil soup.

Every year, it saves me.