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Nancy, we miss you

Czarnina

Back in May 2002, I was lucky enough to be interviewed by Candy Sagan of the Washington Post to be headlined in its Food Section. And I was doubly lucky, because the week after the article came out my phone rang and the voice at the other end said it was impossible that the Post’s “Souper Woman” did not know about Washington DC’s “infamous Bi-Annual Soup Party.” On the spot, I was invited to attend the upcoming one in 2 week’s time.

That was pure Nancy. Nancy Manuszak was a little slip of a woman who packed a TNT punch–forging people and good times together with gusto, smoking and drinking up a storm, impossibly good hearted, incredibly complicated, and Polish to her toes. If it wasn’t her infamous soup parties, it was sausage making. If it wasn’t Friday night hen parties at controversial films, it was happy hour oysters and champagne at Old Ebbits. She greeted me as the honored guest at that first soup party and went on to proofread and challenge every statement of my book when it was still in manuscript form. She came to Paris my first Christmas here, toting a 1974 guide from her last visit, and complained about everything that had changed since then. Always we talked about soup–and especially Czarnina, which she recommended above all other soups and which I was never able to make since fresh duck or pig’s blood is not an easy ingredient to come by. “I’ll have to take your word for it,” I would say. “Humph,” she’d reply, lighting another cigarette.

In fact, Nancy died suddenly just when I’d gotten back from my first ever trip to Poland and was midway through an email to her to say, dammit, I STILL couldn’t find a bowl of Czarnina, not even in Krakow…but that I had a great new story about one related to it from Michener’s Poland. Her brother Zak wrote to me and to her hundreds of friends across the world with the news. Now her local friends in DC–Sheila and Judy and Doris and Harriet and all the others–are throwing a last, glorious Soup Party, with balloons, on April 18 to commemorate the outrageous life and opinions of Nancy Manuszak. And I can’t go in anything but spirit. So, Nancy, let me tell you this last story about Polish Black Soup. I have no doubt you’ll figure out a way to tap into the web from heaven to read it.

“Ignacy Mniszech himself went into the kitchen to supervise preparation of the soup, a task at which he spent most of that day, absenting himself from the noontime meal so that he could avoid responding to Bukowski’s implied proposal of marriage. He spent that time slaughtering a young pig and carefully catching all its blood in a ewer, which he brought back to the kitchen, where he added vinegar and salt to the blood and set the ewer aside.

“Asking the cooks for what meat stock they had, he added to it bits of cooked pork and chicken, two large handfuls of chopped vegetables, three heavy soupbones and six large dried mushrooms that he and his daugher had gathered that autumn.

“‘Prunes!’ he called, and cooks hurried up with a large handful. ‘Cherries!’ and they came up with a cupful of dried delicacies, which he tossed into the brew.

“He tended the soup all afternoon, tasting it now and then and soliciting advice from his professionals. ‘I want this to be the best. More salt, do you think?’ When it was done to everyone’s approval, a distinguished golden Polish soup, he stirred in a large helping of crumbled honey cake to bind the various elements together.

“‘An excellent soup,’ he said before the evening meal, and when he heard the guests assembling in the dining hall he divided his soup into two portions, one extremely large, the other so small that it would serve only one person, and into this latter helping he stirred the dark blood and vinegar, keeping it over the fire until it turned an ebon black.

“‘Dinner!’ he shouted as he left the kitchen, and behind him came four servants bearing soup bowls for the guests, who sniffed approvingly as their rich portions of amber colored soup were placed before them. Ignacy took the final bowl from the fourth servant and walked silently, ceremoniously to where Feliks Bukowski sat. Deftly, using both his big hands, he placed the bowl of black soup before the impetuous suitor, and when Feliks looked down at it and saw the terrible blackness he knew that his proposal of marriage had been rejected, and so did everyone else at the table.

“Convention required that he make no comment, betray no emotion. Like a soldier assigned a hateful duty, he ate his black soup, cruielly aware that the soup of the others was a rich golden borwn, and after Feliks had finished his bitter dish, Ignacy Mniszech, big and bald and brazen, rose and announced to his guests, ‘On this day my daughter Elzbieta is announcing her engagement to Roman Lubonski, son of my dear friend–Count Lubonski in Poland, Baron Lubonski in Austria. Wedding’s to be at the Mniszech palace in Warsaw, and you are all to attend.’”

Nancy, I’m missing you a lot. Your absence is a bitter, black soup to eat. “Humph,” I can hear you say.