A Side Note

On soup and sewing

Readers who know me only through this platform may not know of my side hustle in soup. For the past fourteen years — a figure that still startles — I’ve been organizing a weekly winter event in here in Chicago called Soup & Bread. A casual community meal designed to bring people together in our most isolated season, and to raise money for local hunger relief organizations through pay-what-you-can donations, Soup & Bread has been central to helping me build a community of care and chosen family here in a city 2,000 miles away from the family that shares my name. Along the way, we have raised more than $100,000 for local food pantries and mutual aid groups. I wrote a cookbook! And we have seen friends and allies take up the idea and replicate it everywhere from Milwaukee to Traverse City to Oslo, Norway.

And then in 2020, as with everything, Soup & Bread was canceled by covid.

Rather than coming together to eat in community we found ourselves more isolated than ever. I wrote a bit about this in May of that year, as part of the preface to a new edition of my cookbook. While in 2021 and 2022 we experimented with Zoom soup, and cobbled together a takeout soup situation, it just wasn’t the same. It was nice to see familiar faces online, or popping in to pick up quarts of soup for their families, but it lacked that nourishing juice of real connection.

When I was diagnosed with cancer in the spring of 2022, I was thrust back into isolation, just as covid-imposed restrictions were starting to lift. And after unexpected (and extremely complicated) circumstances led to the temporary closure of the Hideout, the bar that has historically been our home base, it really seemed like all signs were pointing to the end.

And yet, it was not. In partnership with Slow Food Chicago we hosted a soup dinner and panel discussion (on the joys of heirloom beans) almost exactly a year ago last December. Walking through the crowded room, so hot I had to take the hat off and bare my bald head, I felt that old pleasurable rumble. It’ll never be the same, I realized, but it doesn’t have to be. We brought back monthly soup dinners in early 2023. And now, we’re doing it again in the new year. For Chicagoans: that’s the first Wednesday of the month from 6-8 pm at the Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia. (See the website for more.)

But, wait: this long tale isn’t over yet!

Over the last fourteen years, I’ve saved hundreds of souvenirs from Soup & Bread, in the form of the handmade cards with which cooks have identified their soups. Some of these are beautifully designed laminated signs, some are construction paper collages. A great many are hastily sketched Sharpie-on-scratch-paper notes, never intended to survive the night. Some of them still bear fossilized splotches of soup. During the darker days of the pandemic I would sometimes pull them out and leaf through the piles, each little card sparking a memory of togetherness. And now some friends and I are working on a new project that we hope will continue to spark that flame.

Yesterday we announced the launch of Soup & Thread, a series of sewing bees at community spaces around Chicago. All are welcome to join us as we decorate and stitch together these 1,000+ soup cards — now scanned and printed onto waxed canvas — to create a giant quilt. We are hosting monthly bees through the summer, or as long as it takes to get the job done. Our first bee happens Saturday, January 27, at the Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia in Bucktown. The second takes place Saturday, February 17, at the Creative Chicago Reuse Exchange, 2124 W. 82nd Place in Auburn Gresham. Many hands make light work (right?) and we can use all the help we can get to complete this audacious task.*

We will provide all supplies, and — of course — a light meal of soup and bread. We will also be leading lightly facilitated conversations around food and community in the (post) pandemic era. What does it mean, now, to come together and share food? Who is missing from the table? Who never gets enough to eat? All of this will feed into an exhibit in the fall of 2024. In the summer of 2025 we are planning a series of public picnics, inviting guests to gather around our picnic blanket in the park and define a new space for eating together in community.

We are still working out some of the details (follow @soup_and_thread on Instagram for more) but I’m sharing this here in the hope that those of you in the neighborhood feel invited to join in, as you can. Share it with your quilting group and your crafty friends! And if you have ideas of community spaces in town that would be up for hosting a bee, please get in touch. Thank you!

*Speaking of help, I should mention here that Soup & Thread is supported by a grant from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. We are grateful for the city’s belief in the worth of this frankly slightly cracked endeavor!