PAGING: Hardcore Bean soup lovers. Tponetom

[tponetom]

FOREWORD
[[I am going to post this story in 3 parts. If you get bored with Part I, you can skip parts II and III.
PART I
PAGING, Hardcore Bean Soup Lovers. Tponetom
Bean soup will stick to your ribs, but not your digestive track.

A Religious Recipe
Yes, yes, I know. What is the Detroit connection? I am glad you asked.
Back in the nether years of grade school in 1941-‘42, Nativity Grade School inaugurated a one-day a week lunch program, located in the church basement cafeteria. Students would be charged ten cents for a complete and delicious lunch,,,, or so said the P. R. blurb! P. R. stands for "Priest Rectory."
A few of my schoolmates and I sampled the new lunch emporium after begging for hours on end with our mothers to surrender the cash. No credit cards were accepted.

Well, as the saying goes, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!"
Indiscretion led to ingestion which then led to indigestion. So should we tell our mothers that Julia Childs was not cooking up a storm in the basement of the Holy church? The visions of ‘sugar plums’ were not dancing in our heads, but those ten pennies were rattling around in our devious little minds.
Soooo, come next week, "Ma, can I have a dime to buy my lunch?" No hypocrisy stated or implied in that simple request.

My classmates and I had already planned on going to Greasy Gus’s Gaslight Restaurant, located on Gratiot, near McClellan for lunch, if we got that almighty DIME. [[The DOLLAR expression came much later.) We got the dime and so we did!
I ordered a bowl of bean soup, the only item on the menu costing a dime. It was not a teeny-weeny, four ounce, drip of a teaser. It was a goblet of Elixir! It made the Nectar of the gods, taste like a watered down version of a cheap ‘chaser’.
So we used that ploy and got away with it for three weeks. Then, Ma and the other mothers compared notes, and we lost the Mother Goose that doled out the golden eggs, or pennies, as it were.
But a love affair had been burned into my palate. BEAN SOUP! Bean soup! "Say it LOUD and there’s music playing, say it soft and it’s almost like praying" [[even though I lived on the EAST SIDE.) [[Credit to Jerome Robbins, I think???)
Now this is where the the real story begins!
Before the Bean Soup epiphany, potatoes were my favorite food. In those early years, if you did not like potatoes,,,,,you didn’t get anything to eat.
I am going to make some analogies between Bean Soup [[B. S. for short) and LADIES , and LOVE in general.
I do have certain talents that I admit to. No false modesty when it comes to beans! Please go to Part II. This story gets a bit long and I do not want to exceed the "character" limit.
I think I get charged for vacant lines and spaces.

[gazhekwe]

I love bean soup too. I hope the recipe shows up somewhere. Awaiting part II

[eriedearie]

I'm right there with 'ya Gaz - I love bean soup.

Com'on Tp...spill the beans on Part II!

[caldogven]

Tp
Being from Pennsyvania and Warren, I too enjoy and can relate to your post's.
I also like bean soup almost as much as I like West Side Story. Not to be picky, but Stephen Sonheim wrote the lyrics to Maria not Jerome Robbins, who directed the movie and did the chorography. Years ago there was a little restaurant behind the Highland Park police station called Red Hots that had great bean soup.

[Alfie1a]

mmmm bean soup. I like it with a nice medium sized onion [[eaten like an apple) and some fried corn bread.

I love reading your stuff, Tp. You are quite the essayist.

[Bobl]

Ah, yes!
Bean soup, best cooked slowly on top of a wood burning stove in late autumn/early winter. Even better at deer camp, with corn bread and beer.
Somehow tastier when created north of the Big Mac Bridge!

Anxiously awaiting parts II and III of you epistle, t.......