This is How a Friendship Ends: A Recipe for Miso Ginger Carrot Bisque

This is Half Recipes, a narrative recipe column by Nina Coomes on what it means to feed and care for yourself and those you love.

Ingredients

• 2 pounds of carrots

• 1 large white onion

• 1 knob of ginger (It occurred to me today that maybe my vision of a knob might not be someone else’s vision of a knob, so I measured this out. It was four tablespoons of minced ginger. Is that a lot of ginger? Am I a ginger fanatic?)

• 1 tablespoon coconut oil (any oil is fine, if you don’t have coconut)

• 2 teaspoons salt

• 1 tablespoon turmeric

• water, roughly 1.5 quarts

• white miso

• 1 can full-fat coconut milk

• optional: scallions, cilantro, and black sesame seeds for garnish

Directions

1. I feel a little embarrassed writing this. Whether it was the transpacific move, the accompanying culture shock, some innate awkwardness of mine, or some combination of all of the above, I did not have someone I could solidly call my friend until I was fifteen. Bless my artsy-nerd friends I made in high school, many of whom reacted to me saying they were my first friends not with incredulity or ridicule but with marvel at how novel and wonderful friendship seemed to us then.

Friendship and friendlessness hold awkward places in contemporary American society. People will listen empathetically to a person who has grown distant from their family or has been unlucky in love. Talking about being unlucky in friendship, on the other hand, seems taboo. One can have a raucous social life, or a few close companions, or even identify as a loner who prefers their own company, but speak aloud an unmet yearning for friendship (I don’t have friends but I want them) and up rises an adolescent scrum of feelings. Shame, humiliation, sadness, and confusion stall the conversation. An uncomfortable chatter descends, replete with suggestions to join clubs or extracurriculars.

I am fascinated by friendship. I was preoccupied by it as a child, sick with envy as other kids fell into easy laughter and joking. I am obsessed with it now as an adult, heavy with gratitude after another casual phone call from a friend across the world, who fills me in on her dog’s antics and the shows she has been binging.

Friendship is where I labor, blunder, and struggle. It is the arena in my life where failure leaves me disoriented, sometimes devastated. Friendship is also where I delight, grow, and learn. It is where success feels transcendent, where I am moved to tears by the mutual love and respect that can grow between people who are not related to each other or in a romantic relationship.

Anyway, this is an essay about soup, but it is also about friendship.

Or rather, this is an essay about soup and how a friendship ends.

2. Chop carrots into rough disks. I do not peel the carrots because my father always says that’s where the nutrients are, and, if you blend this soup, the peels become undetectable anyway.

3. Mince a large white onion. Peel and finely mince the ginger.

4. Though I met my husband while in college, I would say that the great love of my university years was Y. Y was a runner and a painter, and she preferred to eat her salad without dressing. Though we were not immediate friends (for the first few months of college, I experimented with being the blasé Art-Asian in a group of mostly white people who loved to party and quickly found that the role exhausted me), eventually I found myself spending as much time as I could with her. At first, I was drawn to her out of awe. She seemed so put-together, shiny, and driven. By being around her, I adopted her habits and quickly felt healthier, more on top of my schedule and studies.

But after a year or so, I felt something give, sliding from admiration into intimacy. Our conversations turned inward, dealing frankly with our many anxieties. I saw her dorm during finals, not the clean and sparkly room I’d first encountered, but the regular stressed-out mess of a student keeping her head above water. One day, we were walking back from lunch, and I confessed to her that I struggled with friendship, that I felt self-conscious about attaching myself too zealously, too desperately to people. I expected her to pull away or to say that she was glad I said this because she’d been meaning to ask me to back off. Instead, without breaking stride, she said she knew what I meant and that sometimes she felt like she had too much love to give. My heart swelled.

5. Add one tablespoon of coconut oil (olive is also fine) into a heavy-bottomed soup pot. Sauté your onions over a medium-high flame until translucent. Add chopped carrots and salt. Mix thoroughly until the oil has coated the carrots and onions. Add in ginger and turmeric, mixing again. When everything is evenly covered, add enough water to cover the mixture. For me, this is about a quart. Turn the flame down to medium-low. Put the lid over the mixture and let simmer until carrots are soft. Go about your day, checking periodically to make sure the water hasn’t boiled down and the pot hasn’t scorched. Timing will vary depending on the strength of your stove and how finely you cut your carrots.

6. This soup marked the beginning of the end of our friendship. Y was the first person I ever made it for. I knew she would like it, with its heaping serving of vegetables and its flavors of sharp ginger and earthy miso. A few months after that first time, she invited me to her college apartment and said she would make the soup for me. When I got to her place, the soup was on the stove.

As we waited for the carrots to soften, we talked, though awkwardly. I had graduated a year early for financial reasons and she was still in school. Increasingly it felt like our conversations revolved around shared remembrance, not a shared present. Still, I wanted the friendship I had dreamed to exist, the type of relationship where we would be at each other’s weddings, where we’d celebrate one another’s promotions and birthdays. I ignored my discomfort and clung to my pantomime of normalcy.

Not all relationships are built for transition. Some need to end. 

Finally, the carrots had cooked through. She began to search in the drawers of her kitchen for her roommate’s immersion blender—the last, and in my mind most crucial, step to making the soup. Y was an organized person, her roommate a little less so. The immersion blender was not in its place, and Y grew more and more frustrated as she searched for it. Finally, she turned to me and suggested we eat the soup without blending it.

I balked. The soup isn’t inedible unblended, but it would be exceedingly unappetizing. Chunks of soft carrot float in a briny broth, leathery skin peeling away with each bite. The flavors would be disparate, the texture strange. I insisted we look a little more. Eventually, the immersion blender presented itself and we were able to eat the soup as intended. But I found myself returning to the incident over and over again.

Y was a perfectionist in everything she did, including in the kitchen. One Christmas she sent me a box of cookies decorated with such intense precision they looked like jewels, each flavor and type neatly annotated on a card. Another year, she stayed up hours into the night making multiple cakes, one for my birthday, another for her sister’s, and she’d been nearly reduced to tears when her first ganache didn’t turn out. Could it truly be that she was exhausted by the hunt for the blender and didn’t care if the soup was less than perfect? Or was it more because the meal itself was an afterthought, an attempt to salvage a friendship that was already on its last legs?

7. When the carrots are soft, turn off the heat and add white miso. Use an immersion blender to blend the carrot-broth-miso mixture into a thick puree. In college, I would add water at this step until the texture was soup-like, turn the heat back on until the soup was acceptably hot, and serve as is. But in adulthood, I have started adding a can of full-fat coconut milk. It turns the carrot soup into something creamy and bisque-like, gentle on the tongue followed by a blossom of latent heat from the ginger. I think of the addition of the coconut milk, turning the bright orange soup into a lighter, softer color, as a kindness to myself.

8. I should clarify: We did not break up over the soup. I can also admit that maybe, at the time, I was overthinking the immersion blender. Instead, the friendship continued for more than a year afterward. I found a job and moved, as did she. In retrospect, we both were growing out of our old selves, slowly becoming adults. I can’t give you an exact date or dramatic dinner where we stopped being friends. I can only say that it was a slow fading, a gradual and at times painful transition from being in communication every day, to every week, to every few months, to once a year and, now, not at all. My twenty-eight-year-old self tells my twenty-year-old self that the intense, girlish friendship we’d sustained while we were students didn’t fit our new lives. Not all relationships are built for transition. Some need to end.

For years afterward, thinking about it hurt. If I’m being honest, I still can’t really look the friendship straight in the eye. I’m not like this about other relationships. If I were to see a romantic ex on the street, I would probably laugh or be bemused, if anything. With this friendship, I glance at it sideways. I remember fragments of memories, half closing my eyes as I look through old emails to find a certain fact, trying not to read my fawning prose, still somewhat convinced I was too much. Here was a relationship in which I experienced some of the highest, fizzling champagne delight of my early twenties, as well as my lowest, gut-swirling sadness.

9. I don’t have a neat end with a moral to this story. I only have this soup, which I still make all the time. I make it for myself on days where I have drafts due and chapters to read, where the best lunch is something that will take a long time on the stove, filling the house with the golden fragrance of ginger and turmeric. I make it when I find myself with bits of sweet potato and pumpkin that need using, or other orange vegetables that can be quickly thrown in and blended with the carrot. I make it because I want a vehicle to eat a package of freshly baked pita from the market, pillowy with steam.

Mostly though, I make this soup for my friends. I made it for M and N when they came to discuss the petty trials of being writers and thrilled when they asked to take home leftovers, grinning as I spooned it into mason jars. I made it for T and A last winter as we shivered around a fire pit in the unromantic cement of my apartment complex’s backyard, handing out mugs of it to try to keep us warm during our pandemic-safe hang. I made it for C when she visited from California, an unexpected and precious friend who was first my sworn enemy in high school, who I now see was somehow too similar to me, causing me to display my worst, cattiest teenage behavior. Whoever it is for, however it is eaten, and however the friendship may end, it has been, is, and always will be a soup I make for friends.

10. Ladle soup into bowls. Garnish with thinly sliced scallions, a few pieces of cilantro, a shake of black sesame seeds—whatever best suits the beloved friend you are serving. When you begin to hear them scraping the sides of their bowl with their spoon, offer them more.

• 0