It’s perfectly OK to subscribe to the General Sisters Winter Soup Delivery just for the soup. You’ll love weekly offerings like the deep-purple borscht — made with beets and served with mushroom dumplings — and the leek-and-potato, greenly luscious on an icy January day.
Dana Bishop-Root and Ginger Brooks Takahashi deliver the homemade vegan soup and a small side dish to your home or workplace at mid-day each Wednesday. They drop off the current week’s meal cold in its half-gallon mason jar — four bowls’ worth — and take away last week’s empty, all for $13 a week. (The rate rises to $15 in February, when soups include Moroccan chick-pea and carrot-ginger.)
But this is more than lunch. The two young women, artists and New York City transplants, live in North Braddock, where Bishop-Root is active with projects like repurposing an abandoned church. The women are also working to turn a former plumbing workshop on Kirkpatrick Street into a general store and social hub — something they say the town is lacking.
The soup service, which currently has 17 subscribers from Braddock and Regent Square to the Carnegie Mellon campus, is another exercise in community-building. Local, seasonal ingredients are emphasized — and so is the idea of recognizing what connects us, by way of veggie-grater, bowl and spoon.
As Takahashi puts it, “A lot of it is trying to share this food culture with people.”
For more information, email generalsisters@gmail.com.
This article appears in Jan 25-31, 2012.
