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Rachel Roddy’s recipe for pearl barley, lentil and vegetable soup | A kitchen in Rome
A typically Roman, rustic soup-stew made with ancient pulses
Like many of their generation, my grandparents managed the chaos of life with tins. Biscuits, buttons, screws, tea, picture hooks, old keys, shoe polish, used stamps, crackers, cakes, shortbread, plasters, crayons: all had one. Even tins – liquorice, mints, balms – had a tin, some of which seemed as old as my grandparents themselves, and were hard to open. Others celebrated events, or were reminders of places visited. The best tins by far, however, were those full of sweets. One lived in the kitchen, the other in the glove compartment of Grandpa’s immaculate car.
I can picture my grandma opening the kitchen sweet tin, which was blue with a raised white pattern and shaped like a postbox; she’d pull off the lid, then lower it to grandchild level. I remember the cold smell of Fox’s Glacier Mints (Grandma’s favourite, so always dominant) and how we would rummage past their blue-and-white wrappers in search of a humbug or barley sugar. The dimensions of a boiled sweet are perfect, as are a wrapper that can be twisted off and the thick sweetness of a barley sugar, the most wholesome of sweets.
UK readers: click to buy these ingredients from Ocado
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