Chicken Soup

Jeanpant and I flock for canteen soup every day to have with our crudités. Yesterday she made a keen observation: “This is all congealed like snot”. I dropped my spoon.

There’s a thing or two you should know about JP. She works those kitchen staff. It took her a while but now one can safely call her the Canteen Dominatrix. Normally the inflexible serving staff don’t alter their industrial converyor-belt style of dishing up, producing a standard pile of rice, 3 blocks of chicken and a litre of sauce, 6 frozen carrot disks and a kilo of green beans. There are specific starch and vegetable accompaniments per each protein item on the menu.

But not for her.

“Lewis, I will have the veggies that go with the roast beef – those ones – and the fried rice, and a bit of the spinach”. Her mix-and-matching-bucks the system. The first time she did it there was a deathly silence. The clatter of cutlery on trays ceased. The till stopped ringing. Employees in the queue held their breath. Confusion reigned behind the serving counter. Who was this woman, treating the set menu like a buffet brunch?

This works for Jeanpant and Jeanpant alone, because she has the right amount of giggle to go with each demand. Her outright dissidence is tempered by her charm. And Lewis is her puppydog.

Anyway, yesterday, the thought of that soup being the result of some collective honking back of mucous by Lewis and the Philippino bird who does the microwaving was too much for me. I would rather starve. JP was all over it. “It needs heating up, bloody hell”. Next thing our soup was being nuked and it returned to us bubbling at the edges. And it had lost a lot of its elasticity and had de-thickened. It turned out the snot effect was a red herring.

In the end it was a fine chicken soup. And then it dawned on us: that translucent stuff in which bits of chicken are suspended, looks and tastes EXACTLY like the filling in Spar chicken and mushroom pies in SA. It’s like the pie, without the guilt.