Ham Soup is hearty. It was particularly well suited to wintertime eating when meat hung heavily in the attic and the vegetable supply was dwindling.

Chicken and corn have unusually compatible flavors. This soup is a newer twist on the traditional pot pie. With the addition of noodles or rivvels it has a close resemblance to, yet is a welcome variation on, the old favorite. Again, the ingredients are homegrown. Amish cooks are sought after to prepare the Chicken Corn Soup offered for lunch at local fire company dinners and at the food stands at farm auctions in the Lancaster area.

“My mother cooked from the garden. Usually she put in our soup whatever she had a lot of, plus a beef bone to give it flavor. Now the women use a lot of hamburger.” The ingredients vary according to the day and season. Some Amish cooks can gallon jars of vegetable soup. It’s a way to avoid wasting what can’t be eaten as food grows in excess in bountiful gardens. It’s also a deposit against drop-in company or a hectic day when housework interferes with food preparation. The seasoning in soups, as well as most warm dishes eaten by the Amish, is usually limited to salt and pepper. If any ingredient is added to the vegetables, meats, and milk, it is most often sugar. In general, people prefer mild food; one spicy exception is the wide use of horseradish, especially with meats.

Cooks who use a thin tomato juice for their soup generally use flour to give more body to the old favorite.

Some Amish cooks can a pulpy tomato juice, so laden with vegetables that their tomato soup requires no additional thickening.

“We ate lots of bean soup; we grew our own ‘Lazy Wife Beans.’ They would be planted at the edge of the cornfield so they’d grow up the stalks and get plenty of sun. That way you didn’t have to cut your own poles! But now you can’t do that because they spray the corn. “Bean soup was often our Saturday noon meal—with schnitz pie! It was an easy meal. The beans could cook while you cleaned. The pie, of course, had been made the day before.”

Either rivvels, noodles, crackers, or a white sauce have usually been mixed into the soups served at the kitchen tables of Amish households. There is a strong preference for starch in the food tradition of these people. Rivvels are used in different ways. In one home the custom was this: “My mother made them in broth or water, then fished them out when they were cooked through and we’d put them into whatever soup we were eating, to make it go further.” In another home, “We usually made just Rivvel Soup—rivvels in milk with melted butter—rather than putting rivvels in other things.”