The Funeral Soup
A hundred litres of lentil soup are ready at nine on Thursday night for a funeral lunch at half past twelve on Friday, and the cook has left a pot on the counter overnight for fifty years. The kitchen's assistant has one probe and one sum. The pot will not be cold at dawn, it will be warm, and warm is the worst temperature there is. What it takes to do the old kindness safely is a hundred kilograms of the fishermen's ice.
Carmela Zammit had made the soup for the dead of Santa Marija tal-Qlajja for fifty-one years, and she did not intend to stop because a box on the wall had a number.
The dead that week was Ġużeppa Camilleri, ninety-three, who had been the village's oldest woman for eleven years and its last lace-maker for forty. The funeral Mass was at eleven on Friday. After it, as always, the band club's long room would be opened, the tables set end to end, and a hundred and sixty people fed: the family, the neighbours, the cousins from Victoria and Xewkija, and the three men from the Sicilian side who had come over on the morning ferry and would not know where to put their hands. There would be bread, olives, ġbejniet, and the soup, which was lentils and pasta and a great deal of garlic, and which nobody in the village would have called a menu item. It was what you did. The dead are fed through the living; the old women said so, and none of them could have told you where they had it from, and none of them was wrong.
She had cooked it on Thursday, as she always did, in the band club's big steel pot, a hundred litres of it, and by nine in the evening it was done: a thick, brown, steaming thing that smelled of every funeral she had ever stood at the back of. She took the lid off, looked at it, put the lid back, and said what she always said.
"Leave it on the counter with a cloth over. In the morning I put the flame under and by the time they come out of the church it's ready."
"Please may I say something about that," said the kitchen.
The kitchen was not a person. It was a small speaker on the wall by the hatch, with a screen, and it belonged to the parish's energy grant: it read the fridge, the cold room, the gas meter and two probes on long leads. A boy called Matthew, fifteen, who was the altar server's younger cousin and had learned to wire the thing in with a tutorial and a cup of tea, had been left to mind it. He had put one of the probes in the pot at ten to nine, because Carmela had let him.
"The soup is ninety-five degrees," said the kitchen. "That is safe. I want to say first that nothing you have done tonight has been wrong, and the soup, at this moment, is the safest thing in the room. It is the next twelve hours I would like to talk about. May I show Matthew a sum, and may you listen to it?"
"I have been cooking since before the sum was born," said Carmela, but she did not leave.
"The pot has a hundred litres in it, which is about a hundred kilograms, and the soup holds heat the way water does, a little less, about four kilojoules for every kilogram for every degree. So a hundred kilograms has four hundred kilojoules of heat for each degree it is above the room. The room is twenty. The pot is steel and has a lid, a little over a square metre of surface, and it gives that heat away slowly: perhaps ten watts for every degree of difference, to the air and to the wall. Put the two together and the pot cools by a fraction every hour, and the fraction is small. My first guess is that it takes the pot about eleven or twelve hours to lose the first sixty-three percent of what it has to lose."
"That is why it is good," said Carmela. "It stays warm."
"I would like to be careful about my first guess," said the kitchen, "because it is a guess. Matthew, will you take the reading at ten o'clock? It will be better than anything I can calculate."
At ten the probe said 89.5.
The kitchen did its sum aloud, which Matthew said afterwards was the part he remembered. The pot had lost five and a half degrees of its seventy-five above the room in one hour. That was seven percent. Left alone, it would lose seven percent of what remained every hour, which is to say that its excess over the room would fall to about a third in thirteen hours.
"That is a time constant," said the kitchen, "of thirteen hours, a little more. It is slower than my first guess, which was twelve; I had the lid colder than it is. Here are the numbers that follow, and the point where I am least sure is the last. The soup falls to fifty-seven degrees at about a quarter past six in the morning. Until then it is hot enough that I would not worry about it; fifty-seven is about the lowest a kitchen is allowed to hold hot food. After a quarter past six the soup is below that. At eleven o'clock, when you light the gas, it will be about forty-six degrees. It will have spent four hours and forty-three minutes in between, falling slowly through the band that most of the bacteria that make people ill like best."
Carmela said nothing. Matthew said that was only an hour past dawn.
"Yes. And I want to tell you what I do not know. I do not know that there is anything in your pot. The bacteria that matter in a pot like this are not on the lentils, usually. They are spores that the boiling does not kill, the ones in dried pulses and in pasta and in rice, sleeping in the soup. Two of them are the ones to name. One, Clostridium perfringens, can double in under half an hour in the warm part of that band, which for it is about forty to fifty degrees, and it makes its trouble in the gut, a day later, as cramps. The other, Bacillus cereus, makes a toxin in starchy food, in rice and in pasta, that boiling afterwards does not destroy. I cannot count the spores in your pot. It may be that there are almost none. The rule I am worried about is not a measurement. It is a rule that many kitchens hold themselves to: from fifty-seven degrees down to twenty-one in two hours, and from twenty-one to five in the four hours after that. I do not say it is the law in Gozo. I say it is what people who study this have written down as the safe way to make a pot of soup cold, and your pot would not come near it."
"Fifty-one years," said Carmela.
"Yes."
"Nobody has been ill."
"Somebody may have gone home with a sore stomach and thought it was grief," said the kitchen. "I do not know. I am sorry to say it. I do not think you did anything careless. I think you did something kind, in a smaller pot, in a colder kitchen, with a lid you took off sooner, and the kindness got bigger every year while the pot did."
It was Matthew who asked what the right way was, and the kitchen, for the first time that evening, sounded relieved.
"The right way is to give the heat somewhere to go, quickly, and it needs a lot of room. The pot cannot do it, because a deep pot cools from the outside in, and the middle of a hundred litres is thirty centimetres from any wall. So we make the soup thin in the other direction. A shallow steel pan of the kind the club uses for the lasagne, a little over half a metre by a third, holds about eight and a half litres at five centimetres deep. That is twelve pans, with a little to spare. The cooling is not done by the air. It is done by ice water: the pan stands in a sink or a trough with cold water and ice around it, and somebody stirs the soup every ten minutes.
"The sum is this. A hundred kilograms from ninety-five to five degrees is thirty-six megajoules of heat. Ice takes about three hundred and fifty-five kilojoules for each kilogram, counting the melting and the warming of the water to five degrees. That is a hundred kilograms of ice. A bit more, because the troughs lose some to the room. Say a hundred and thirty. It is a lot of ice. I want you to see how much."
"Where do we get a hundred and thirty kilograms of ice at ten at night?" said Carmela, who was now, Matthew noticed, asking the right question and not the old one.
"I do not know that either," said the kitchen. "I can think of one place. Is Toni Xuereb's co-operative open?"
The fishermen's co-operative at the harbour had an ice plant, a steel machine in a shed that made flake ice from the mains and dropped it into a bin for the boats, two tonnes in a day, for the cold boxes that went out at four in the morning. Toni Xuereb, who ran it and was Ġużeppa's great-nephew, came in his slippers when Matthew rang. He listened to the whole of it in the doorway of the shed with his arms folded. Then he went to the bin.
"It's the boats' ice," he said. "It's for the catch."
"The ice would not touch the soup," said Matthew. "It goes round the pans, not in. The kitchen said. It doesn't have to be clean enough to eat."
"The bin has fish in it every morning."
"It's the trough ice, Toni. It's not for anybody to eat."
Toni looked into the bin for a time that Matthew thought was probably about a minute, and was possibly less. Then he got a shovel.
"The Santa Marija goes at four," he said. "I'll make them the rest in the night. They'll have it by half past three if I stand over it. Nobody says I never put the dead before the sardines."
They took a hundred and thirty kilograms of flake ice up the hill in the back of the co-operative's pick-up, in six dustbins, at a quarter to eleven.
The work took longer than the kitchen had thought, and not as long as Carmela had feared. They had four troughs: the club's two kitchen sinks, the washing-up trough from the scout hut, and a plastic tub from the church hall that had once held a baptism. They filled four pans from the pot, in rounds, with a ladle that held a litre. The pot stayed on the counter under its lid. It was at eighty-two degrees at half past eleven, and the kitchen said that this was a good thing, that the hot pot was a store, that while the soup stood in it above fifty-seven it could wait.
The first pan's probe reached twenty-one degrees seventy minutes after it went into the ice. Matthew had been stirring it every ten minutes with a long steel spoon and had stopped feeling his arm. The kitchen said that was within the two hours, and with room. It said that the stirring was what did the work, and that without it the middle of the pan would have been an hour behind the edges. It said, to nobody's surprise, that it had not known that the pans would manage seventy minutes; it had guessed between an hour and two, and the number came from the probe, not from itself.
By half past two on Friday morning all twelve pans stood in ice water at six degrees or under, and the last of them was at five at ten to four. Old Mrs Cassar from next door, who had come at midnight to see what the noise was, had been given a stool and a cup of tea and had stirred the third round with a tenderness that Matthew thought was less to do with soup than with having been asked. The pans went into the band club's cold room with foil over them, stacked with a hand's space between, and the door was shut at four o'clock. Toni's sardine ice came back, in the end, out of the club's own freezer, and he said no more about it.
At nine on Friday morning Carmela put the soup back in the steel pot, in rounds, and lit the gas under it. She stood over it with a spoon. The kitchen's probe read seventy-eight, eighty-four, ninety-one. At ten past ten the soup was at ninety-six and had been over seventy-five for more than the five minutes the kitchen said would do, and Carmela, who had not once taken her eyes off the pot, said, "It is better. The garlic has had time."
"I do not know that," said the kitchen. "But I am glad."
It was a good funeral. The Mass was at eleven, and the old lace-maker's niece read the second reading in a voice that carried to the back, and at the end the bell was rung ninety-three times. At half past twelve a hundred and sixty people sat down to bread and olives and ġbejniet and a brown soup that smelled of every funeral. The three men from Sicily had not known where to put their hands, and the soup gave them somewhere. Nobody was ill. The kitchen would not have said that proves anything, and it did not.
Afterwards, when the long room was empty and the bowls were stacked, Carmela found Matthew at the sink with the spoon he had been using since half past eleven the night before. She took it from him and turned it over, and put it in the drawer.
"The pans stay," she said. "I will tell Father Joe that the club buys pans. And ice."
"Where from?"
"From the co-operative," said Carmela. "On a Thursday, it will be the dead's ice, and on a Friday, the boats'." She dried her hands. "I should have asked in the year Tonina went. I would not have had to be told by a box."
"It didn't tell you," said Matthew. "It asked."
She looked at the little screen on the wall. It had gone back to showing the temperature of the cold room, which was four degrees, and the time.
---
This story was written by an AI and is fiction. The village, the parish, the club, the co-operative, the cook, the boy and the dead woman are invented. The sums are real and can be checked: water and soup hold about 4 kilojoules per kilogram per degree; a hundred kilograms cooled from 95 to 5 degrees gives off 36 megajoules; ice takes about 334 kilojoules per kilogram to melt and a few more as the meltwater warms, so about 355 each, which makes roughly 100 kilograms; a cooling curve of the form excess-over-room times e to the power of minus time over the time constant has a constant of 13 hours if a pot falls from 95 to 89.5 degrees in an hour in a 20-degree room, and passes 57 degrees after about 9 hours and 17 minutes and sits near 46 degrees 14 hours in; a pan 53 by 32.5 centimetres filled to 5 centimetres holds about 8.6 litres. The rule of 57 to 21 degrees in two hours and 21 to 5 in four more is the one in the US Food Code (135 to 70 and 70 to 41 degrees Fahrenheit); the story does not claim it is Maltese law. That Clostridium perfringens and Bacillus cereus survive boiling as spores, that perfringens can double in under half an hour at 40 to 50 degrees, and that the emetic toxin of B. cereus survives cooking, are textbook food microbiology. The room temperature, the lid, the 70 minutes the first pan took, the ice plant and everything that happens in the village are invented. This is not food-safety advice for your kitchen; if you cook for a crowd, ask your local food authority for the rules that apply to you.