Green Tomato Soup with Black Forest Ham

March arrived this week and the air has started to remember what it is supposed to feel like. The high Tuesday was sixty-eight. The low Wednesday morning was forty-six. I opened the kitchen window at five-thirty on Tuesday afternoon and let the cool air come in for the first time in two months, and the basil plant on the windowsill leaned slightly toward the screen the way plants do when they remember light. Spring is fifteen days off but, like last fall, is already arriving in advance of the calendar. I have decided that Oklahoma has two springs and two falls now: the official one and the early one. The early one is what we are in this week.

I want to write down two things before I get to the soup, because both of them are part of the soup, and the soup will not make sense without them.

The first thing is Mrs. Henderson’s stick blender. Mrs. Henderson three doors down knocked on the back door Sunday morning at nine with a small white-and-chrome appliance in her hand. It was a stick blender — the immersion kind, the kind that goes directly into a pot of soup or a mixing bowl. She said, Kaylee, my arthritis has gotten so bad in my hands I cannot grip the handle on this thing anymore, and I have decided you should have it. She pressed the stick blender into my hands. I tried to give it back. She said, baby, you have been the cooking girl on this block for a year now. I am giving you my tools the way the tools are meant to go. Take it.

I took it. I am keeping it on the kitchen counter next to the cast iron skillet. Mrs. Henderson has been giving me her old kitchen tools all winter, and I have been accepting them, because the gifts are how she has decided we are family, and you do not turn down family. She has so far given me a Bundt pan, a wooden rolling pin, a pie weights set in a small ceramic bowl, two mixing bowls, a hand-held citrus juicer, and now the stick blender. Each one she has carried over with the same small ceremony of pressing it into my hands and refusing to take it back. The drawer in the kitchen has had to be reorganized to make room. I am writing this down because the gifts are the small evidence of a thing that has happened to us this fall and winter, which is that the neighborhood has decided to take care of us, and I do not want to ever forget that the household is held together by more than just the household.

The second thing is the soup recipe itself. I have been holding the green tomato soup with Black Forest ham recipe in my notebook for two months because the recipe is a winter soup and I did not want to make it after winter started feeling like it was leaving. Sunday morning, with the stick blender on the counter and the temperature outside still cool enough that hot soup made sense, I decided this was the Sunday.

The recipe is from A Family Feast. Green tomato soup is exactly what it sounds like — a soup made from green tomatoes, the unripe ones, which are tangy and slightly sour and which produce a soup that tastes like nothing else does. The recipe assumes you canned green tomatoes yourself last summer in Mason jars, the way home cooks have done since the canning jar was invented. I did not. I do not know how to can yet. (It is a project for next summer, on the list in the back of the notebook.) Instead I bought a 28-ounce jar of Aldi’s house-brand green-tomato salsa-base, which is the closest substitute I could find at the prices we shop at. The jar was $2.49.

The math: 28-ounce jar of green tomato base, $2.49. A medium yellow onion, $0.20. Four cloves of garlic from the bulb, free. Two tablespoons of olive oil. Six cups of chicken broth from bouillon, $0.40. Salt, pepper, dried thyme, a bay leaf from the rack. A half pound of Black Forest ham from the Dollar General deli, $4.99 (the most expensive single ingredient; the deli ham at Dollar General is, in my opinion, the cheap-source-ham worth paying for, and I will defend the deli choice). A small handful of fresh parsley for the garnish, $0.99. Total: about $9.10 for a pot that fed Mama and me Sunday and Monday with leftovers for my Tuesday Sonic-shift lunch.

The technique is the same soup-building I have been writing about all winter, with the stick-blender step at the end. You sweat the diced onion in olive oil in a large soup pot over medium heat for five minutes until soft. You add the minced garlic for thirty seconds. You pour in the jar of green tomato base, the chicken broth, the bay leaf, the dried thyme, salt, and pepper. You bring to a simmer. You cover and let it simmer gently for thirty minutes — long enough for the flavors to meld and the soup to taste like a soup, not a jar of base mixed with broth.

You take out the bay leaf. You use the stick blender directly in the pot to puree the soup smooth. The blender takes about ninety seconds of work. The soup goes from chunky vegetable-and-broth to a smooth pale-green velvety puree. The texture changes the eating experience entirely. Pureed soup is a different food than chunky soup, and I had not appreciated that until Sunday because I had not had a stick blender before Sunday. Mrs. Henderson’s gift transformed a soup I would have made anyway into a different and better soup.

While the soup blends, you cook the Black Forest ham. You stack the slices, cut them into half-inch ribbons, and toss them in a hot dry cast-iron skillet for three or four minutes, stirring frequently, until the edges crisp and curl. The ham becomes salty smoky crisp ribbons that hold up in a hot soup the way bacon does on a baked potato.

You ladle the smooth green soup into bowls. You top each bowl with a generous scattering of crispy ham ribbons and a few leaves of fresh parsley. The colors in the bowl are pale spring green of the soup, deep mahogany of the crisped ham, bright green of the parsley. The bowl looks like the kind of bowl on the cover of a March issue of Bon Appétit.

Mama got home Sunday at six. She walked into the kitchen. The stick blender was on the counter. The pot was on the stove. The Black Forest ham was sizzling in the cast iron. She said, baby, what is happening in here. I said, I am making the green tomato soup we have been waiting for. She sat at the kitchen table. I served two bowls.

The first bite hit her hard. She closed her eyes for a second. She said, oh, Kaylee. She took another bite. She said, this is fancy in a way I do not have words for. She ate the whole bowl. She had a second one. She said, baby, I am proud of you for what you do in this kitchen. I want to write that down. The cooking is becoming, as we go, the work of the household and also the joy of it.

The eighth visit was Saturday. Cody scored 84 percent on his second GED practice test on Tuesday afternoon. He is on chapter twenty of The Grapes of Wrath. He has been re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird too, on a library swap from the unit. The Bible is on his shelf. He is reading. He is studying. He is, I want to put on the page, becoming the kind of young man the unit is supposed to produce, which is more than the unit usually produces.

We are at day fifty-six of six hundred seventy-six. Spring is fifteen days off. The basil plant is leaning toward the window. The stick blender is on the counter where it lives now. The cooking goes on.

The recipe is below, the way A Family Feast wrote it. If you canned green tomatoes last summer, use those. If you did not, the Aldi house-brand green-tomato salsa-base is a workable substitute (the regular Walmart-brand green-tomato product would also work). The trick I want you to keep is the crispy ham — do not skip the dry-skillet step. The ham crumbles transform a smooth soup into a soup with texture, and texture is the thing pureed soups need most.

Prep Time: 15 min | Cook Time: 45 min | Total Time: 1 hr | Servings: 4

Ingredients

1 1/2 lbs green tomatoes (or ripe Roma tomatoes), halved
1 medium yellow onion, quartered
4 cloves garlic, unpeeled
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt, plus more to taste
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 pinch sugar
2 cups chicken broth
1/4 cup heavy cream
3 oz Black Forest ham, diced small
1 tablespoon butter
Fresh parsley or chives for garnish (optional)

Instructions

Roast the vegetables. Preheat oven to 425°F. Arrange tomatoes cut-side up on a rimmed baking sheet along with the onion quarters and unpeeled garlic cloves. Drizzle with olive oil, season with salt and pepper, and roast for 35–40 minutes until the tomatoes are caramelized and slightly collapsed.
Prep the garlic. Remove the baking sheet from the oven and let cool for 5 minutes. Squeeze the roasted garlic cloves out of their skins and discard the skins.
Blend the soup. Transfer the roasted tomatoes, onion, and garlic to a blender. Add the chicken broth and blend until completely smooth. Work in batches if needed, and hold a folded towel over the lid — hot liquids expand. Blend on high for a full 60 seconds to get it silky smooth.
Simmer and season. Pour the blended soup into a medium saucepan over medium heat. Stir in the heavy cream and pinch of sugar. Taste and adjust salt and pepper. Simmer gently for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Do not boil.
Crisp the ham. In a small skillet over medium-high heat, melt the butter. Add the diced Black Forest ham and cook 3–4 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the edges are lightly crisped and fragrant.
Serve. Ladle the soup into bowls and top each with a spoonful of the crisped ham. Garnish with fresh parsley or chives if desired. Serve immediately.

Nutrition (per serving)

Green Tomato Soup with Black Forest Ham — A Late-Winter Soup with Mrs. Henderson’s Stick Blender