Turgus Sriuba (otherwise know as Market Soup)

Every Sunday for 4 weeks now Scott and I have made a hearty pot of soup with whatever we can find at the Klaipeda market, which is still an endless source of fascination for me. The things one finds there! Outside, along the tables that stretch long-ways under the slanted roofs, there are mum fireworks exploding everywhere out of rusty, sawed-off plastic water bottles. Buckets upon grubby white buckets of orange mushrooms. Crates of raw red cranberries. Gnarled white parsnip fingers. Tumbling heaps of pink and green apples. Runty brown onions, peeling. Garlic in tubby ivory clumps. Wilting, lovesick bouquets of parsley, lovage, cilantro. Caveman clubs of green zucchini. The rare bell pepper, red or green or orange, small, often wrinkly, and deformed. And the people-the people! One man with a mouth like a rotten bathtub cut me a piece of pear, fondled the heft with his soiled hands, drew the knife across. In America, I would have run the other way screaming. As it was, I took the sample straight from his coal-black fingers, popped it in my mouth, and promptly bought a kilo. Best pears I’ve ever tasted.

Inside the market building you find the meats and eggs and cheeses. The ham section, for me, is like a car accident. I just stand there and stare until they try to sell me something, upon which point I get scared that I’m going to accidentally purchase Wilbur’s foot and move on. There are pig snouts and pig hooves stacked in piggy pyramids. Sawed-off piggy faces with the little piggy eyes, glazed over. Curling piggy ears, pink and alert. It’s like they would have just put the whole pig in there if they could have, but to make it fit, they simply chopped off the parts that stuck out and tossed them into separate piles. I wonder if they even killed the poor things first or if they just started lopping. As an American, I naturally feel that meat should be completely unrecognizable, even though I know that to wish this is to drown myself in falsehood.

Further on, there’s my chicken buddy who surprisingly hasn’t died of Salmonella even though she picks up the raw, rubbery pieces with her bare hands and does questionable things, like smear her fingers on her sticky apron or lick them thoughtfully to assist in separating plastic bags. One time I saw her drop a woman’s change onto a heap of raw flesh. My chicken buddy simply dug it out, wiped it on her grimy sleeve, and handed it over the counter. The woman looked almost as disgusted as I felt, which made me feel a little less foreign.

Then there’s the egg lady, whom I secretly fear, with a castle of blonde hair and lips like a two-year-old colored her with crayon. She will never allow me to buy less than 10 eggs at a time, even though I try obstinately to pretend I don’t understand her when she rejects, over and over, both my mini egg carton and my carefully rehearsed Lithuanian. “Sesi kiausinai, prasoum. Sesi kiausinai.” I’ve even tried calling her bluff by shaking my head and walking forlornly off with my empty container, but she is adamant. She knows she is the only egg lady at the market, and she uses it to her advantage. I’ve got to find another egg lady, one who understands that it would significantly raise our cholesterol if we had to eat 10 eggs before they went bad.

Once home, we pull out all the precious veggies and scrub off the thick clumps of dirt. Scott sets up shop at the dining room table with our only good knife and the cutting board while I boil water and fry up the chicken. As I mentioned in an earlier post, it is cold here and there’s no heat yet, so cooking a big pot of soup serves not only as sustenance for days but also as a furnace of sorts. Pretty soon the windows fog up with the rolling steam and we toss the onions and garlic in with the chicken. The pot becomes a veritable rainbow. Red tomato skins, white and orange parsnip and carrot medallions, khaki potato cubes, translucent ribbons of onion. Then, the finale, a heap of fresh herbs that glow almost neon green for a glorious minute, then fade to the color of autumn grass.