“It is whatever it becomes,” I told my son.

I was not giving him advice on writing or life. I was teaching him how to make soup.

He was moving out, preparing to be chief cook in his kitchen, as I had been chief cook in our family kitchen his whole life. Naturally, he wanted to learn to make what I often said was my favorite thing to cook.

But I couldn’t give him a recipe. The ones for all my breads and sweets are written in a little book. The kids’ favorite beans and broccoli — there are recipes for those. For biscuits, an entire disquisition.

Soup, though? No. Soup is some combination of what you’re hungry for, what’s in the fridge and what happens as you cook. “Start with a chill in the air and a half-cup of rice from last night’s dinner,” an honest recipe might begin.

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As Laurie Colwin once wrote, a soup made from leftovers is “a kind of lost chord and no one will ever find it again.” So don’t even try to look for it. Instead, use the memory of it to inspire you to compose something new.

Soup “is by its nature eccentric: no two are ever alike,” Colwin also wrote. But every homemade soup evokes similar feelings. For the soup eater: warmth, comfort, restoration. For the soup maker, the pleasure of feeding your loved ones well and the joy of creating something from almost nothing.

Tap into those feelings and you’re tapping into something universal.

In Minneapolis recently, I crossed the Mississippi for a bowl of borscht. The Twin Cities aren’t a melting pot so much as a six-burner stove with pots bubbling next to one another. Wanting soup, I could have headed toward Hmong Village in Saint Paul for khaub piaj or the Somali neighborhood in Cedar-Riverside for maraq fahfah. But it was windy, so I chose the closest pot: an Eastern European restaurant founded by Ukrainian immigrants.

Every culture has soups because every culture has people whose ingenuity is greater than their means, and soup stretches precious little to accommodate a crowd. A pound of........

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