Column: How my grandma's caldo de verduras always brings me back to my childhood (and cures my cold)

The conversation usually starts with me asking my mom before she is planning to visit.

“¿Me haces sopa de verduras?” (Will you make me vegetable soup?)

To which she always replies, “Do you mean soup or caldo?” 

I always forget that caldo is the kind that my grandmother used to make. The one that tastes like my childhood. The caldo is cooked with the vegetables barely cut in half, which I used to hate because it would give me more work having to cut each piece. But somehow, that’s how I like it now. 

One day I made vegetable soup, with all the veggies cut up in small pieces and it wasn’t the same. Perhaps it is only the memory that keeps me attached to the potatoes cut in half, the large pieces of corn and the carrots. 

Potatoes are especially my favorite and they always have been. I’ve always loved leaving that delicious half piece of golden potato, with the skin still on, until the caldo’s liquid is almost gone. I will cut it slowly and enjoy piece by piece, pouring some lime and salt on each spoonful. 

My husband watches perplexed as he sees me pour lime on my caldo, then lime on my elote and finally on my potato. 

“Isn’t that enough limón?” he will ask me. “Never enough,” I say. 

Each spoonful of caldo brings me closer to the days when I used to hate it whenever my grandmother would make it. But now it reminds me of the aromas in her kitchen. Of her voice telling me I had to eat it. 

Nowadays I only eat it when it’s cold or when I have a cold. Nothing brings me back to health like the caldo de verduras. 

For my husband and my daughter, vegetables are not enough. “It needs some meat!” she will insist. “At least some chicken,” he will say. But no. El caldo de verduras is how my grandma used to cook it for us, all of my cousins, and me, even during summer (especially during summer). My grandmother was vegetarian, and even though I never have been, even though my parents tried, I still prefer the caldo to be meatless. And even though we didn’t like eating vegetables, we could feel our grandma’s warmth through the broth.