How to Make a Simple Soup

I like rice. My family eats fish at home. I cannot cook, but I can make tea. My favourite food is chicken with rice.

In my country, we eat a dish called shakshuka. It is made with tomatoes, onions, and eggs. First, you cook the onion in a little oil. Then you add tomatoes and cook them for ten minutes. After that, you break two eggs into the pan. We eat it with bread, often for breakfast. I like it because it is easy and warm and it reminds me of home.

My mother makes a dish called dal almost every week, and I have been trying for years to make mine taste like hers. I never succeed, but I keep trying.

First, you wash a cup of red lentils very well. Then put them in a pot with about three cups of water and a little salt. Bring it to the boil, then cook on low heat for about twenty-five minutes, until the lentils are very soft.

While the lentils are cooking, heat a little oil in a small pan. Add cumin seeds, garlic, and a small chopped onion. Cook them slowly until the onion is brown. After that, pour this mixture into the dal and stir.

At the end, my mother adds a squeeze of lemon and some fresh coriander.

My mother does not measure. She knows by smell. I think this is the part of the recipe I cannot learn from a book — only from her.

My mother used to make tea for me when I came home from school. It is the simplest thing in the world, and I want to write it down before I forget how she did it.

First, boil fresh water — never water that has been boiled before. Put two spoons of black tea into a small pot. Pour in the boiling water. Let it sit for four minutes. Pour it through a strainer into a glass cup, not a mug. Add sugar if you want it; add nothing if you don't.

This is, in writing, almost nothing. It is barely a recipe. But there is a thing I want to say about it, which is that I have, in my adult life, had many cups of much more interesting tea — fancy teas, ceremonial teas, teas brought back from other countries by friends. None of them taste like the cup my mother made me when I was twelve and crying about something at school.

I don't think this is because her tea was technically better. I think it is because she made it for me, in a quiet kitchen, when I needed someone to make me something. Most simple food, when I think about it, has worked this way. The food matters because of what is happening around it.

I have, for about ten years now, been walking the same forty-minute route around the small park near my flat, almost every morning, in roughly the same direction. I want to write the route down, partly so that I have written it down somewhere, and partly because I have begun to think that the practice of walking it — which is, in any real sense, the same on every occasion — has been doing something for me that I had not, until recently, properly understood.

The route goes like this. Out of my front door. Left along the main road for two streets. Right at the junction by the closed bakery. Through the small park, taking the path that goes round the duck pond clockwise. Out through the gate at the far end. Along the canal for ten minutes. Across the bridge. Back through the streets I have just walked, but now slightly differently, because the morning has moved on while I was in the park.

This is, I am aware, an unremarkable description. It is not a route anyone else would find particularly interesting. It is not a route that gets shared. It is, in any of the senses by which our culture measures the value of an experience, more or less invisible.

What I have come to think, walking it, is that the unremarkability is approximately the point. There is a kind of structure that small repeated practices give to a life — a quiet daily place where nothing in particular has to happen and nothing in particular is being produced. The walk does not generate insights. The walk does not solve problems. The walk produces, at the end, the same person who started it, very slightly readier for the day. I have come to suspect that this small readiness is something I do not, in fact, generate elsewhere. The morning routes I do not take are, I think, the ones in which I begin the day already slightly behind.

Walk this route, or one like it, or don't. None of this generalises particularly well. What I can say is that there is a category of small daily action — walking, cooking, watering plants, making the bed properly — which contains, I have begun to notice, more than the action itself, and which is hard to write about without sounding either grand or trivial. I have, as you can see, mostly failed at avoiding both. The walk, however, will keep.

I have been making, for the better part of fifteen years, more or less the same cup of tea — produced, with what I now recognise to be a slightly suspicious consistency, at the same time of the morning, in the same way, in the same cup. It is a cup of tea of no special distinction. It does not contain leaves I have brought back from anywhere. It does not involve a teapot of any cultural significance. It is, in any of the senses by which the present moment in food and drink writing measures the value of an experience, an unusually unremarkable cup of tea, and I would like, for a few minutes, to argue that this is exactly the point.

The procedure, for the curious, is approximately as follows. Boil fresh water — never reheated. Place a single bag of black tea in a plain ceramic mug. Pour the water on while it is still actively rolling. Wait three minutes by an internal clock that has, over the years, become unsettlingly accurate. Remove the bag. Add the smallest possible quantity of milk. Drink it sitting at the kitchen table, looking, in some inadequate way, out of the window.

This is, in writing, almost nothing. It is barely a recipe. It is, in fact, the kind of procedure one would not normally bother to describe at all, and the very act of writing it down here has the slightly absurd quality of formalising something that has resisted, throughout, being formalised. I am aware of this. I find I want to do it anyway.

What I have come to think, fifteen years in, is that this small daily procedure has done a thing that very little else in my adult life has reliably managed. It has produced, with great regularity, a fifteen-minute window in which I am not yet doing the day. The tea is not the day. The tea is the small interval before the day, in which I sit, and drink it, and look out of the window at a small city street that I have looked at for so long that I no longer, in any active sense, see it. The not-seeing is part of what is happening. Something else is.

I am, of course, conscious that this kind of claim is precisely the kind of claim that essayists make about whatever modest activity has happened to give their lives a structure. I do not, when I read pieces about morning runs or pre-dawn writing routines, fail to notice that these pieces argue, with mildly fishy consistency, for the unique meaningfulness of whatever the writer happens to do. I am asking you, reasonably, to be a little sceptical of me as you would be of them. I am not, on present evidence, in possession of any persuasive case that morning tea is, in any defensible sense, more important than morning anything-else.

What I am more confident in saying — at the lower bar of personal observation — is that the months in which I keep this procedure are detectably different from the months in which, for whatever reason, I do not. The procedure is not, in itself, any kind of accomplishment. The kettle boils whether I am present or not. The day will, by any measurable standard, proceed regardless. But there is a small structural fact about a life that contains a fifteen-minute morning window, and a slightly different small structural fact about a life that does not, and in my own case the difference has turned out, with some consistency, to matter.

Make the tea. Or don't. The water will, in either case, boil at much the same temperature.