I’ve been curious about Hull-House’s ongoing Re-Thinking Soup project ever since I heard about it this winter — but it wasn’t till they paired it with the Jam-Off that I managed to get moving.

And you know what? It was pretty great. The organizers of the soup lunch and other endeavors, like a recent workshop on canning and preserving, seem to have a lot of fun finding ways to honor  both the settlement house movement’s 20th-century mission of providing education and community to the immigrant poor and the museum’s goals of preserving Hull-House’s history and creating modern opportunities for outreach.

Here soup fans are lining up in the historic Residents’ Dining Hall for bowls of curry-cauliflower soup. The tables are decked out with brown butcher paper and crayons, bowls of (really tasty) whole-grain rolls, and copies of Joan Dye Gussow’s This Organic Life, Marion Nestle‘s What to Eat,  and other pertinent reading material, including the intriguing, if rather wonkish, Food Marketing to Children and Youth.

The soup itself was good; rustic (read: chunky), but piping hot and not too spicy, made with garlic, onions, mushrooms, cauliflower (duh), cream, and curry powder in a veggie stock. Here’s a close-up.

Re-Thinking Soup has a more explicitly educational mission than Soup and Bread, and many meals have included a guest speaker — a farmer, a food activist, a chef, etc. By surprise I ran into my friend R., who teaches at UIC, and she said that said that the last time she’d stopped in for soup the speaker was  historian Susan Levine, who talked about the history of the National School Lunch Program — a subject that, with the recent push for a new Child Nutrition Act is suddenly/again very of the moment. (And thank god for R. and her husband, J., who had jam entered in the competition, because without them on my flank I would have just been some weird loner hanging out taking pictures of soup and preserves.)

Today, though, there were no speakers — only  a brief introduction from someone (I didn’t catch her name) on the Hull-House staff, who talked a bit about canning and its connection to both the history of home ec and the current local/sustainable food movement, as a means of allowing people in crummy climates such as, say, northern Illinois, to eat locally produced foods year-round. Then she set us loose on the jam.

Two long tables were set with baskets of crackers and bowls of preserves, both homemade and commercially produced. Judges made their way down the tables clutching Dixie cups of beans, tasting as they went and signaling approval by bestowing our beans on the favorites.  By the end of it all I was so buzzed from all the sugar that my head spun. But in addition to J.’s raspberry-black currant (which was tart and delicious) I gave my beans to a crazy black raspberry-wild strawberry-chocolate combo,  some finely strained tomato preserves that were, seriously, sun in a bowl, and a super chunky peach-cardamom preserve that was really more like a compote.

The winner will be announced on HHK blog soon, but when I left a distinctive strawberry-lavender blend appeared to have pulled ahead in the bean count. I liked this one as well, though J. seemed to think it was slutty, dubbing it “too easy to love.”

I don’t even want to know what that says about my palate.

There was also a silent auction of preserves donated by both jam-off contestants and celebrities like the Publican/Avec/Blackbird family, canners at Lula and Nightwood, and Paul Virant, of Vie, whose offering is pictured above.

Intriguing. A sort of dulce de leche?  The internet yielded this.

When I left this was holding firm at $15; I decided to stick with my own bid on a jar of the super Sun Gold tomato preserves. I found out later that I won.