Food Is Memory or…We Accidentally Spent 2,000 Words Thinking About Matzoh Ball Soup

Why is food so personal?

The pressure of the perfect matzoh ball soup is real

I was talking with a writer friend recently and she asked me a question that I haven’t quite been able to shake.

Why is food so personal?

At first, I gave what felt like a perfectly reasonable answer.

Family.

Tradition.

Culture.

The sort of answer you give when somebody asks a thoughtful question and you’re trying not to sound like you’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time thinking about matzoh ball soup.

But the more I sat with it, the less satisfied I became.

If food is really just about family, why does the smell of onions cooking in butter hit people so hard? Why can a single bite of something transport you twenty years into the past faster than a photograph?

Why does every culture on Earth seem to have some version of chicken soup waiting in the wings for life’s difficult moments?

And why soup, anyway?

That’s always fascinated me. Nobody celebrates with soup. Nobody wins the lottery and immediately says, “Let’s get chicken noodle.”

Nobody gets engaged and books a private room for matzoh ball soup (perhaps you should, wink*).

Yet the moment life gets difficult, soup enters the conversation. It feels strange until you stop thinking about the soup itself. When you’re a child, soup simply appears and funnily enough, that's how memory works.

You don’t remember the shopping trip.

You don’t remember the recipe card tucked into a drawer somewhere.

You don’t remember somebody standing over a stove skimming broth or slicing carrots.

You remember the bowl.

The steam.

The smell.

You remember sitting on the couch wrapped in a blanket while Bob Baker introduced the next Showcase Showdown somewhere in the background.

We never saw the work that went into it, the soup just seemed to magically appear.

In fact, most childhood magic works that way. Dinner appears. Laundry gets folded.

The house somehow stays standing.

As children, we’re blissfully unaware of the "machinery" operating behind the curtain.

One day the deeply unsettling fact of life hits you...you wake up and realize your mother was younger than you are now when she was taking care of you. All of that childhood magic, the "machinery" you remember is now you.

With that, come the realization that you're exhausted, you know what it feels like to work all day and still have responsibilities waiting when you get home, you know what it feels like to want nothing more than to sit down and do absolutely nothing.

That magic starts looking different. The soup doesn’t seem effortless anymore.

You begin to see the invisible work.

The onions being sliced.

The carrots being peeled.

The celery being chopped.

The chicken simmering.

The stock developing.

The dishes waiting afterward.

And you realize something that never occurred to you as a child:

That bowl of soup wasn’t just food.

It was their time.

Someone gave up part of their day to make it.

Someone wanted a part of them to stay with you when you didn't realize it.

Not because it was convenient, not because it was efficient, rather it was because somebody they loved needed comfort...not just on that day, but for when they were gone.

Maybe that’s why soup feels different.

Not because it’s healing, although every grandmother who ever lived would probably disagree with me on that point. Maybe it feels different because soup is one of the purest expressions of care we have.

It asks for time and time is the one thing nobody gets more of.

Which brings me back to Jewish delis.

One of the things we’ve always loved about making matzoh ball soup is how stubbornly inefficient the process is.

The bones simmer.

The stock develops slowly.

The schmaltz gets rendered.

The onions, carrots, and celery are prepared by hand.

The chicken cooks gently.

The matzoh balls are mixed, shaped, and crafted.

None of these steps are particularly difficult, they’re simply time consuming...And perhaps that’s exactly the point.

Because what makes great soup special has never really been the ingredients. It’s the willingness to spend time creating something for someone else. The truth is that many restaurants don’t make soup this way anymore and boy do we understand why.

Life is expensive.

Labor is expensive.

Time is expensive.

It’s easier to open a bag or open a container. It's easier to let somebody else do the work. It is the new hallmark of our society. Doordash it, Ubereats it, but by all means don't make it when instant gratification exists at the tap of a screen.

The truth is, something gets lost when the process disappears. While flavor definitely is one of those things, there is something deeper that gets lost. Eventually you realize the recipe was never the thing being passed down.

The person was and I think that’s the revelation. We aren’t just preserving recipes...We’re preserving people.

Jewish food culture understands this remarkably well. But honestly, so does everyone else.

Italian nonnas.

Mexican abuelas.

Chinese grandmothers.

Jewish bubbes.

Southern grandmas.

Every culture seems to have discovered the same truth independently. Food is one of humanity’s oldest memory storage devices. Long before photographs, before videos, before social media, before cloud backups.

There was food.

A recipe became a story.

A meal became a family archive.

A dish became a way for one generation to speak to the next.

The older I get, the less interested I become in recipes themselves. Recipes are easy. Honestly, the internet has millions of them...along with a romantic story of hiking through the Alps when the person who wrote the story, stumbled upon the perfect recipe for Zürcher Geschnetzeltes.

What fascinates me are the things that never make it onto the recipe card. The things somebody taught you while standing next to a stove twenty years ago. The things you still do today without even realizing why.

The recipe stays alive because it asks to be performed again.

And every time it is, the person who taught it to you is suddenly back in the room. Maybe not physically (though I swear my grandmother is screaming at me to not overdo it on the salt). But definitely emotionally.

I recently watched Sinners, and one of the ideas that stuck with me was the notion that music can summon the past. Maybe food works the same way. Maybe every family recipe is a kind of séance.. In memory, smoke, and fire...In ritual...in the way you taste the food and something tells you it's exactly right (or wrong...SORRY GRANDMA!).

Whomever that person was for you, that person may be gone, but somehow for those few precious hours...they’re still here.