How I Learned to Cook

I have never been much interested in food, viewing it as the means to survival and not worthy of much serious thought.

When I arrived in Germany as a University Studentin for a year, my cooking repertoire was scrambled eggs and popcorn. The night I arrived in the University town and moved into my lodgings, my landlady took pity on me and drove me to the grocery store. There I exchanged some dollars and bought some food I thought I might need-- as well as some processed food items that looked interesting, but were complete unknowns.

When the Muenster church bell tolled 6 a.m.the next morning, I walked past the cemetery, through a neighborhood full of backyard gardens to the trolley stop. The trolley took me into the center of the city and the the Marktplatz Farmers' Market outside the Muenster. The friendly vendors spoke a German dialect I hadn't learned in college! But I did buy some produce: tomatoes and green beans (vegetables whose German names I could recognize).

I hauled my small purchases back to my apartment and viewed the entire assortment. Now, with these miscellaneous strange and foreign ingredients, what could I make to eat? I was really hungry, so decided to start with something easy. Soup. I filled the small saucepan half-full of water and started it boiling on my single-burner electric hotplate. I added a couple chopped tomatoes and some snapped green beans. I had never made soup before, so there was a sort of delight about the endeavor. The tomatoes cooked until they disintegrated, the skin peeling itself off into the water. It turned a satisfying and reassuring orangey-red. The green beans floated disconcertingly on the surface. When I thought it might be done, I ate the soup. Not bad! Rather plain and thin.

The question remains: was it a tomato soup or a vegetable soup?