Between my junior and senior year of college, I spent a summer in Vienna. Before leaving, I promised my grandfather that I’d visit his birthplace in the Netherlands. My grandpa had immigrated from there as an contract worker.

Little did I know when I made that promise that it was to be a hot Sunday at the very end of my summer, and that only one train from Amsterdam made this trip on weekends, and that I’d be at my energy’s end. I landed on the train for two hours and then walked carrying a full suitcase, through a quaint village called Krabbendijke.

Lee Van Dyke

About The Author

Lee Van Dyke is a retired college professor, living in Portland now, whose career took him to five colleges in as many states, most recently, the University of South Alabama in Mobile.

Arriving, no one answered my knock. As I slowly turned around to make the walk back to an empty train station, I heard a voice call out: “Hey… wait!” I instantly recognized its tone, and knew what the voice coming from a second floor implied. Of course! It was Sunday and they were taking an “after-dinner” nap. That’s what my own parents would be doing back on their midwestern Sunday.

I turned and was welcomed into the house, and a small woman came down one of those steep stairs to be found in tiny Dutch homes. The woman coming down the ladder-like stairs was my mother’s cousin. She really could have been her doppelganger.

After embraces and warm greetings, she said: “you are sick?” Wobbly on my feet, I admitted as much, and was surprised that she had spotted my condition. She pulled on what looked like a large drawer, but in this Dutch home concealed a pull-out bed. I tumbled into the feather mattress, and slept as if in my mother’s arms and care after a summer away.

When I awakened, I was served a soup. Vegetable with a chicken broth. Densely filled with chopped vegetables, chopped celery, and some potatoes and beans. It tasted like the exact same recipe my mother used to make vegetable soup. I recognized its flavor. These women had learned to cook from their mothers, and what their mothers put in soup easily passes tests of time and distance. It was well flavored, and had designed to be good for what “ailed you.”

I have experienced homecomings of all sorts since then but it was then when I first tasted a national pattern for food and how its recipes get passed along.

Meetinghouse is a community storytelling project hosted by the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram.

Read more stories from Maine at www.pressherald.com/meetinghouse