Years ago, an older relative shared this recipe with me. He had grown up in rural Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl years, when times were hard, food was scarce, and bellies often went hungry. His mother tended a little kitchen garden—a luxury when many neighbors had nothing—and gleaned from it what she could. Each summer she canned jars of vegetable soup, heavy with tomatoes, onions, and green beans.
By wintertime, when times were leanest and one could find little more than cornmeal and salt pork in the pantry, those jars of soup seemed like a gift. He described how his mother occasionally managed to find enough extra money for a little beef to cut into the soup. Those were the best times they had, he said….