Making a pot of barley soup and lemon bars

[Warpy]

5. And if unexpected company came, she'd water the stew

and call it soup. My grandmother was a bit like that, kept a pot of soup on the stove during the Depression, would dole it out to any hungry hobo who showed up at the back door. If my grandfather wasn't home, the hobo didn't even have to weed the flower beds.

The only soup I ever got was from Mother Campbell, my mother hated to cook.

Pottage in the old days was rather like the Mulligan stew hobos cooked, whatever they had that was ripe or had been culled or intentionally slaughtered went into the pot. During much of the year, it was meat heavy. During Lent, when many female animals were pregnant and meat was off the menu, it was any grain or legume they had left, supplemented with salted and dried fish. Yum. Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot, nine days old--PU! That was how people lived when the good stuff from the fall harvest ran out. Lent just made them feel pious about it.