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Butch Furse
The cooler weather has brought a favorite aroma from our kitchen. With cooler weather means the Betterhalf will start serving one of my favorites . . . homemade vegetable beef soup. Now this is not just an ordinary soup. She slow cooks that soup in a pretty good size pot and lets it simmer for a few days on the stove before serving. Unfortunately that soup aroma fills the house and stirs up a pretty good appetite. That aroma also stirred up an old memory from my school days.
It’s a memory of a place called “Wimpy’s Inn” that was a hangout for us high schoolers. It was sort of like the former Chuck’s Drive-In was in Aurora. Wimpy’s was the place where I would go and regularly have a milkshake and their homemade bowl of chili soup . . . all for 50 cents. An older lady (she seemed old to me) was the cook and as soon as football season started and the school traffic increased she put her giant steel soup kettle on the stove. Cook Kate Herbster always had hair net on her head hoovering daily over the stove.
The big blue pot simmered on the stove day after day. Cook Kate never took it off. She just added more soup ingredients when it ran low and continued to serve the best chili in town without ever taking the pot from the stove. I never witnessed the pot being removed to be washed or put away until late spring. What was amazing was the fact that flavor of her homemade chili never seemed to change even after pot refill after refill.
These days I have wondered over the years how she handled state food and kitchen inspectors. My memory doesn’t recall any ordered kitchen shutdowns; anyone ever becoming sick from her homemade chili soup recipe; or the seldom washed pot on the stove daily having the potential to contain a few unintentional ingredients.
The chili was great and Kate was great. So, what more could we expect from a 25-cent bowl of chili?
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We are aware politicians can avoid issues. An example: When the mayor of a large community was asked how the depression had hit his community, he replied, “Depression? We have no depression here, but I will admit that we are having the worst boom in many, many years.”
RL Furse is publisher emeritus of the News-Register
