There is a pan with chowder, one with bean soup and rye bread with bacon and sausage rolls. The New Year’s reception of the group of friends of a football club, not mine, starts with a hearty meal, according to the old Groningen and Drenthe credo: those who work hard will eat well, we start with good food.
As I wait for the woman in front of me I see her doing something I have never seen in my entire life. She takes a scoop from one pan and fills the bowl from the other. It takes a moment before I realize what I’m looking at and when she turns around, like ‘you can’, I ask: “Are you doing chowder and bean soup now?” mixed together ?”
“Yes, it tastes good.”
When I tell my wife that later, she doesn’t think it’s special at all. “Snert and bean soup taste the same, don’t they?”
No not at all. They are meal soups and the meat content may be the same, but that is where the comparison ends. We live in a free country, so that lady can do whatever she wants, but you don’t mix raw endive stew with stew. Or mash a croquette into a bamiball. It will be easy to keep it indoors, but you won’t taste what makes a bamiball a bamiball, or chowder.
The only justification I can think of is that one bowl is enough for someone and they still want to taste both soups. But we’re sitting at the same table and she’s bragging once again. Chowder and bean soup again. I continue to be amazed, although I am silently thinking about what it is called. Snone soup? Bert? Bonert soup?
Although most people are full after two servings, dessert follows.
“Delicious, but powerful,” says another lady.