Recipes

Birnenmus  (Pear soup)[3]

Pour 1 litre of milk into saucepan, add 1 pint canned pears.  Mix ½ cup sugar with 3 heaping teaspoons flour and 1/3 cup milk into a smooth paste.  Add to pear/milk mixture.  Heat and stir till thickened.
Serve with Glomskuchen.
In the same way you can make other fruit soups.

Glomskuchen  (Cottage cheese cakes)[4]

 375 gram dry curd cottage cheese, 1 egg,
1 teaspoon baking powder, 3 heaping tablespoons flour, pepper and salt to taste
Mix ingredients, form into patties, fry in butter until done.

Buttersuppe  (Butter soup)[5]

6 cups water, 1 medium potato, 1 cup noodles,
2 Tablespoons chopped onion, 3 stems parsley,
2 bay leaves, salt & pepper to taste
When vegetables are done, add
½ cup whipping cream, 1 Tablespoon butter, and serve.

Sauerkraut Suppe[6]

Boil 1 ham bone or pork hock in 8-10 cups of water
Add: 1 large onion, chopped. 1 bay leaf,  ¼ cup pot barley, 2 chopped carrots,  2-4 potatoes, 1 red or green pepper.
When potatoes are partly done, add
2-3 cups sauerkraut,  dill and parsley.  Cook until potatoes and sauerkraut are tender.
Serve with sour cream .

Grünen Borscht (Green Borscht)[7]

Boil 1 ham bone in 8-10 cups of water
Add:  1 large onion, 1 bay leaf, ¼ cup pot barley,
2 carrots, 2-4 potatoes, 1 sweet pepper.
Cook until potatoes are tender.  Add 2-2 ½ cups sorrel,
dill, and parsley.  Cook a few minutes more.
Before serving, add 1 ½ to 2 cups buttermilk or sour cream.  Guten Appetit!

Wassersuppe (Water Soup)[8]

Boil salted water with bay leaf.  Add kjlietja (tiny noodles made by mixing a bit of water into 1 cup of flour and a pinch of salt, and working to form crumbs.)  Cook until kjlietja are done.
If you are lucky enough to have some fat, fry an onion and add to the soup.  Of course, Kjieltje will taste much better if you can make them with egg instead of water. (1 egg to 1 cup of flour and a pinch of
salt).
In the famine years,  we ate Wassersuppe every day.

by Elsie K. Neufeld

My mother at twelve sits in the shade of an acacia
its wide bole worn as the Ukrainian steppe behind
the rich land bearing far less than this tree its branches
bent low and seed dropped in her apron    meals

every day now water and bones boiled over
and over for soup. Knives and forks long ago hidden
my mother pretending her hunger is gone, and afterwards
eating more blossoms. Tongue against teeth like plough

turning fields under a star-and-sickle flagged sky and she
every day wanting more. Lips chapped, her people
and land bled by famine and she not yet a woman.
Bloated, like the roots of the tree and hungry, so

hungry, my mother at twelve ponders the limbs’
rhythmic squeak and cracked bark then remembers
her father. A loud knock after dark, his hand
in her hair as he told her a story of manna

falling to earth and in its aftermath, quail.
His last whispered words a prayer in her ear
Let none of them starve.

My mother at twelve, her tongue swollen
and teeth filled with grit, swallows again
and again    a husk caught
in her throat.

from Half in the Sun: Anthology of Mennonite Writing.
forthcoming October, 2006.  (See p. 17)