Granny's Homemade Ribble Soup

History: We cooked this for Granny's 80th birthday gathering at which everyone gathered in chairs in a circle outdoors and shelled a couple of bushels of crowder peas while we all talked. Living her whole life on single-family subsistence farms, Lallah Lindler Drafts ["Granny"] wrote, "After our Daddy [Lonnie] was killed in the sawmill accident, our Mother [Belle] determined that she would keep us 7 children together...she would never split us up. Nobody will ever know how hard we had it or how hard we had to work. But we made it and with very little help from anyone. We never went really hungry. But many was the time our Mother got through a meal by cooking a soup bone for broth and making ribble soup. Sometimes she'd go to the corn shed and strip the hard kernels off an ear of corn. She'd crack the kernels up and throw them into the soup. I never became wealthy in material things, but we have more riches than I ever hoped for in family and friends. What our Mother cooked as an inexpensive but healthy staple remains a family favorite for generations to follow! It has been declared that this soup cures illnesses from the common cold to chicken pox to nausea!"

Ingredients: ...use a pot able to hold 2 quarts of soup

•  one and a half cups of all-purpose flour; one uncooked egg (the ribbles will be made from this...ribbles are very small dumplings [German = spatzen]).
    
• beef soup bone


• if you want, add one-fourth cup whole kernel corn and/or a half cup of canned tomatoes
  

Process:

• In a two quart prep bowl, combine the flour and egg. Then, using your hands, rub the mixture between the hands in order to roll out tiny irregular balls and tiny fragments of dough (making ribbles) ...none any bigger than the combined size of 3 BB shots.
    
• With beef bone in that cooking pot & fairly full of water, cook/boil that bone to make the water into soup stock. With the stock at a simmering boil, sprinkle those rubbed ribbles gradually into the boiling stock, stirring as you add. 
    
• Cook three minutes (the corn and/ot tommatoes added), remove from heat and cover, and then let sit some three more minutes. 
    

Servings:

We think this will feed 4-6 people as as a start. All descendants of L. C. and Belle Lindler, teach your  kids  to do this...it's a Lindler tradition we can't let die!!!

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(posted 21 Novermber 2015)