Nettle Soup
Broth of the Gods

One cup or so of rinsed stinging nettles, one cup of chicken (or vegetable) broth, half a cup of fresh cream, a handful of chives, two sliced hard-boiled eggs, salt and pepper to taste: These are the ingredients Grandma Olga used to conjure up a miracle called Nettle Soup.

When I think of her and food, then I think of nettle soup. She obviously cooked and served me a lot of other stuff, but it’s the nettle soup that paints her food picture.

Looking back, her being a nettle soup virtuoso stands to good reason, for all along one side of her front yard grew a sizable forest of hungry, stinging nettles, liable to lie in wait and then leap on and burn any unwary child (as in yours truly) venturing by.

These hard-hearted creatures (which apparently had resisted, and continued to resist any human attempt to uproot them) earned my respect very early on, and I’d always give them a wide birth whenever I crossed the yard. It never occurred to me that you could eat something that could sting you so hard—but apparently, boiling water takes the sting out of them (apt aphorism, that).

I don’t think Olga told me what was in the soup the first time she served it up, perhaps wisely, because as it happened I loved it and I’m not sure I would have, had I known what I was enjoying. I don’t even think I would have tried it, had I known.

Once she let me in on the secret, though, I began to puzzle the question of eating something that stings: how come it didn’t sting your tongue? But even though the secret was now out, I still loved it, and Olga—with her near-endless supply of nettles just outside the door—made it well and often.

An odd thing in retrospect is that I don’t remember Mom Lisbet (who was a trained cook, after all, and very, very good at it) ever making us nettle soup. Then again, word had it that, as a small child, she had fallen into that nettle forest outside Olga’s house, naked to boot, and had burned herself something fierce, perhaps even life-threateningly fierce (though that might be a tale grown larger and larger over the years by the time it reached my ears). Perhaps that had something to do with it, with Lisbet not making nettle soup—something like that is liable to quell your enthusiasm for the nettle race, methinks.

So, as nettle soups went, the only one I ever had was Olga’s, and this held true well into my fifties when I discovered (on one of my Sweden visits) that Anna, Daddy Kjell’s third (and last) wife, could also make nettle soup—and just the right way, hardboiled egg and all.

The last time I saw Anna—this was after Kjell’s passing, and a year before her own—she had made this wonder of a soup for me, especially, (which I managed to spill on her lovely tablecloth, but that’s another story), and I ate it with relish, still feeling deep inside that I was somehow getting the better of the nettles by consuming them. Showing them who’s boss.

In fact, I believe that if stinging nettles knew how good they taste as soup, perhaps they’d think twice about stinging people—especially cooks.

Well, perhaps—since Olga never had any problems harvesting as many of the ornery things as she wanted, whenever she wanted—perhaps they do think twice about stinging cooks, what do I know?

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“They never sting trolls,” says my Troll-Mother Minta, reading over my shoulder as I type this.

“The nettle, or any plant for that matter, that could sting a troll has yet to see the light of day,” I suggest, hinting at her outer envelope which is more hide than skin.

“Not sure how to take that,” she mumbles.

“Take it as a compliment,” I suggest.

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