Scotch Broth Soup

February eighth. Eleven years. I took the day off. Angela drove. Lourdes met us at Angelus Memorial with the sampaguita garlands, frozen then thawed, the jasmine still fragrant in the Arctic air. The headstone: REYNALDO SANTOS, 1955-2008, BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER. The ground was frozen. Everything was frozen. Alaska in February is the state at its most honest — cold, dark, stripped of decoration, the world reduced to its essential architecture: ice and stone and the people who insist on standing in it.

Jason stayed home. This was my request. The cemetery is for the Santos family — for the people who loved Reynaldo as father, as husband, as the man who cooked salmon sinigang and taught his daughter about tamarind. Jason understood. He made coffee before I left. The coffee was waiting when I came home. The coffee is the plan. The plan is presence. Even absence can be a form of presence when it's chosen with care.

I came home and made the sinigang. Reynaldo's recipe. Salmon, tamarind, kangkong, green chilies, radish. The broth was sour and hot and the salmon broke apart in pink flakes and the kitchen steamed and I stood at the pot and added one more squeeze of tamarind — the rule, the inheritance, the lesson my father taught me that has become the lesson I teach everyone — and I cried into the pot, which is tradition, which is February, which is the annual baptism of sinigang with the tears of a daughter who misses her father with a consistency that eleven years has not diminished.

Jason ate the sinigang with me. He didn't ask how the cemetery was. He didn't ask if I was okay. He ate the sinigang and looked at me with the particular expression of a man who loves a woman who cries into soup and understands that the crying is the cooking and the cooking is the grieving and the grieving is the love and all of it is happening simultaneously in a kitchen in Anchorage where a Filipino man's recipe outlives him by eleven years and counting.

The nightmares came that night. Reynaldo on the dialysis machine. The ER. The blurring. I woke at 3 AM and Jason was there — actually there, in the bed, his hand finding mine in the dark without fully waking, the hand saying I'm here without the words. I got up and made champorado. The 3 AM recipe. The nightmare recipe. The recipe Lourdes made for bad dreams. I ate it in the kitchen while the dark pressed against the windows and the champorado was warm and chocolatey and the nightmare faded the way nightmares do: slowly, reluctantly, with the understanding that they'll be back but not tonight. Not with chocolate and a hand in the dark. Not tonight.

My father’s recipe isn’t in this collection — sinigang belongs to him, and I’m not sure it should exist anywhere but in my kitchen and my memory. But on the days when I need a pot of something honest, something that asks you to stand over it and wait while the broth becomes itself, Scotch broth is the soup I reach for. It has that same quality as sinigang: the long simmer, the bones giving everything they have to the liquid, the way the steam fogs your glasses and the kitchen becomes its own small country. It won’t taste like February in Anchorage or like my father or like eleven years of love made edible — but it will be warm, and it will be a pot you made yourself, and sometimes that is exactly enough.

Prep Time: 20 minutes | Cook Time: 1 hour 45 minutes | Total Time: 2 hours 5 minutes | Servings: 6

Ingredients

1 1/2 lbs bone-in lamb shoulder or neck pieces
8 cups cold water
1/2 cup pearl barley, rinsed
2 medium carrots, peeled and diced
2 stalks celery, diced
1 medium yellow onion, diced
1 medium parsnip, peeled and diced
1 medium turnip, peeled and diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/2 tsp salt, plus more to taste
1/2 tsp black pepper
1 bay leaf
1/4 cup fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped

Instructions

Build the broth. Place the lamb pieces in a large pot and cover with the cold water. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, skimming off any foam that rises to the surface during the first 10 minutes.
Add barley and aromatics. Once the broth is clear, reduce heat to a steady simmer. Add the pearl barley, onion, garlic, bay leaf, salt, and pepper. Cover partially and cook for 45 minutes.
Add the vegetables. Stir in the carrots, celery, parsnip, and turnip. Continue to simmer, partially covered, for another 45 minutes until the barley is tender and the vegetables are soft but not falling apart.
Remove and shred the lamb. Lift the lamb pieces out with tongs. Discard any bones and connective tissue, then use two forks to shred the meat into small pieces. Return the shredded lamb to the pot.
Taste and finish. Remove the bay leaf. Taste the broth and adjust salt and pepper as needed. Stir in the fresh parsley just before serving.
Serve. Ladle into deep bowls. The broth should be rich and slightly cloudy, the barley swollen and tender. Serve with thick bread if you have it.

Nutrition (per serving)

Scotch Broth Soup — When the Broth Holds What Words Cannot