Bothy

I used to go to a restaurant in Portland that was owned by a couple of—rather grim—sisters, who believed in health food and served things like whole grain bread and steamed vegetables without salt. Sometimes they served Hungarian mushroom soup. My boyfriend Tim, who had lived in Portland before we met, had been talking about this soup and this restaurant for years. I thought mushroom soup at a health food restaurant sounded kind of gross but that was because I didn’t yet understand. After we moved there we went to the restaurant and then I realized that even though the soup might have been healthy it was also very good. It was full of mushrooms and onions and sour cream and smoked paprika and dill. It was in high demand and you had to get there before it ran out. Maybe the sisters were just stressed. I eventually learned to make it myself.

The other day I was in my favorite place on earth which is a little hippie coastal town with a little hippie health food store and that kind of place is one of my favorite kinds because it is invariably a tiny bit dirty or at least not sterile and not too brightly lit and it isn’t enclosed by a huge parking lot and nobody is ultra efficient or hating their job and if it’s extra small maybe there’s only one cash register. And in this one, behind the counter, there were two vats of soup. Soup available every day at a small store in a foggy town where you can walk outside and sit down at a rickety table in a hidden courtyard surrounded by live oaks covered in lichen and tall incongruous palm trees to eat it is the absolute best. They had corn chowder and lentil-potato-spinach—I had both.

One time we went to a fancy new restaurant in downtown Ojai. It was expensive but they had soup which was cheap and sounded good. The menu described it as “Brothy beans with herbs,” but for some reason I read it as Bothy beans, maybe because it felt more Irish. The owners of the restaurant, also sisters, had Irish names like Meave and Rory. Their soup was simple and incredible. I pictured it being eaten in a small thatched hut on a moor in the Hebrides. It was cold outside the hut and windy but inside there was a crackling fire with a big pot on it. A rough-hewn old wooden table next to a small window with a bleak yet vast view held large bowls and thick peasant bread and tin spoons, and somehow in this wintry scene there were also piles of fresh dill and rosemary and basil and thyme and oregano and lemons for the taking. Or adding to the soup. Which is what I did.

I left Rory’s place that night determined to decipher the recipe and make my own bothy beans. I make them often and they taste almost as good as they did that night in the Hebrides restaurant.

Light but filling, rich yet bright, shallot and beans, broth and pepper and fistfuls of herbs. Mustard and lemon juice. Perfect for peasants or fine dining. A touch of cream—or not. Bothy Beans will take me there.