Frozen Acorn-Jelly Soup

 Frozen Acorn-Jelly Soup

By Bobby Neal Winters

We can travel in space, but we can also travel in time.  And as has been observed by Einstein and Tennessee Williams, “Time is the farthest distance between two places.”

My group had been visiting Konkuk University in Seoul, South Korea.  We were in a (Korean) Barbecue restaurant when I saw something that made me think of a beautiful girl I’d met in graduate school 40 years ago and on the other side of the planet from where I was then.

She was a beautiful latina, though no one I knew used the word “latina” in those days. In the words of Bob Seger, she was born with a face that let her get her way. Her parents were college professors. There was a conversation going on and she mentioned that she had some gazpacho in the refrigerator. 

Being ignorant and wanting to repair that I asked, “What’s gazpacho?”

“Oh,” she said, in a tone that only years later would I be sensitive enough to recognize as condescending, “it is a cold soup from Spain and Portugal...you wouldn’t like it if you were raised on Campbell’s.” 

In hindsight, I can see certain things. One, she had me pegged right off. Not only Campbells, but Campbell's Chicken Noodle if you please. Two, even the beautiful, refined daughters of college professors are works in progress. Three, when a beautiful girl says anything to a twenty-year-old boy, he will remember it even 40 years later, 8000 miles away.

What caused my reverie was the soup I saw on the table in front of me.  There was ice in it, so one could argue that it was a cold soup, like gazpacho.  I looked it over and the only ingredient I recognized was shredded seaweed.  It had the remnants of a thin layer of ice on it like a mud-puddle that was in the process of thawing.

I sampled some.  It was absolutely delicious. 

I looked it up later, and the soup is called muksabal.  I prefer to think of it as frozen acorn-jelly soup.  The acorn jelly is called dotori-muk, and acorn jelly doesn’t quite capture it in my opinion. It is made from acorns--yes the ones from oak trees--and it has a consistency somewhere between that of jello and that of tofu.

The soup was spicy and sour and freezing cold, obviously.  And, to repeat myself, it was absolutely delicious.

The last forty years have had quite an effect on me.  When I was twenty, I thought I was the smartest person in any room I was in.  I’ve learned differently now and am reminded of it on a regular basis. But I have at least been smart enough to cure some of my ignorance.

Our time on Planet Earth is the best university there is...if we want to learn. In our youths we can be ignorant and arrogant.  We can be privileged and insensitive. That is par for the course.  Forgiving ourselves, forgiving others, and even coming to the realization that there is nothing to be forgiven because that’s just life happening.

Everything we encounter is precious.  Even a bowl of soup can remind us of a beautiful girl from 40 years ago and a planet away.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )