For the past few years, come fall I almost decide I’m not going to bother with Around the World in 40
Soups. It’s a lot of work. I’ve run out of ways to get customers to eat tripe. There are too many hard-
to-find ingredients in Misr Wot. And maybe people are getting sick of it (including my staff, who has
to find fufu and nassella and cook tripe).

But something always happens that makes me change my mind. 

Last year it was running into the daughter of one of our biggest soup fans, who had recently
passed—so we dedicated the year’s travels to him.

This year the something that happened was reading Louise Erdrich’s newest novel, The
Sentence. We sell the book at Modern General, and I had been meaning to read it but was in the
deep weeds all summer. Finally, I stayed up all night in a nest of pillows, reading. The Sentence is
about books, a lovable independent bookstore, and wrestling with our ghosts (which are sometimes
demons). 

Tookie, the main character, is one of my favorite literary figures of all time. Partly for egocentric
reasons, yes. Tookie adores books, food, trees, and fluffy beds. Those are my most favorite things,
too. 

Tookie loves to eat, and she especially covets soups. After serving ten years of a jail sentence (for
body snatching and drug running; yeah, gotta read the book), Tookie is released. What does she
do? She takes a “tour of world soups.”

Which is why the theme for this year’s travels is Soups for Tookie. We’ve put all of the soups
mentioned in the book (well, except for the bull penis one) on our schedule. Some we have made in
past years, some are totally new—for instance, Leberknodel suppe. You can see our full soup
schedule below!

Pick up a passport at one of the Vinaigrettes and get it stamped every time you try a soup; there will
again be prizes that are no joke and supportive of other local businesses. ALSO, I highly
recommend reading The Sentence. It’s the perfect read for this strange period of reconciliation that
we are all in; it seems like we’ve all been wrestling with ghosts, as individuals and a society, lately.

But if you buy the book, honor one of its most important themes by purchasing it from a local,
independent bookstore—you can buy it from us or Collected Works in Santa Fe, Book People in
Austin, or buy it directly from Ms. Erdrich’s bookstore Birchbark Books, which is the setting for most
of the story but also has a great online store.