Empson soup

I might get a mid-day phone-call: 'Jones, I have a young poet coming
to lunch. I'd be very glad of your support.' I would find him in the
kitchen in the fawn dressing-gown which he habitually wore over his
clothes as a comfortable house-coat, busily making last-minute
preparation and turning a mess in a saucepan. This was 'Empson soup',
a dish which almost defies description. It was concocted from a Heinz
tin, to which was added sundry left-overs of vegetables he had tucked
away in corners of the fridge, plus the left-overs of yesterday's
soup, so that one day's soup would not be noticeably different from
the next. There was a large quantity of solids – butterbeans, chunks
of celery, slabs of cabbage and bits of boiled egg, and much reduced
and recycled gunge, but one would not have been surprised to find
anything in it, even false teeth. You could not stir it, you could
only turn it over. He ate it every day and Hetta maintained it was the
cause of his ulcer.

John Henry Jones, 'Diary', LRB 17 August 1989