The scent of caramelizing onions fills the house as I woke up today, a sweet yet potent scent that tickles my nose, like freshly cut pineapple, that can only belong to caramelized onions. With onions comes other scents too: the smell of freshly chopped parsley, the smell of dough rising – a warm scent that fills the house with a mood of comfort—and the mellow smell of a vegetable medley simmering with the onions. The weather outside is a raw drizzle, leaving the day looking bleak and gray and leaving my family without the energy to be productive. There is a small fire crackling in the fireplace, just barely enough to be heard. The only lights come from the kitchen because no one else is awake yet except my dad. When all of these things come together, all signs point to today being Sunday.

Sunday is a big deal in my house, but not because of any religious reason. With Sunday (with and without rain) comes Sunday soup, which is a meal that cannot be beat. Growing up, I never liked soup. Maybe it was because I was young and ignorant to try anything that didn’t smell like pasta, but I’m so glad that I started to love it. My dad is the chef of the family, developing a meticulous and perfectionist love for the craft in his youth. A middle-aged landscaper and farmer turned gentle baker, wakes up early on Sundays to start prepping the ingredients for their long simmer throughout the day. Today was no different. The meal takes hours to cook properly, so he will start it midmorning to have it for early evening. The soup itself varies each week but the idea itself is always the same: homemade soup. Everything from the noodles to the vegetables to the bread is made or bought fresh.

When most people think of prehistoric cooking—it’s a kettle soup. There have been findings of a soup bowl with scorch marks that dates to 20,000 B.C. In fact, Neanderthals are thought to have boiled down animals in large pots using hot rocks to cook down the fats and create a drinkable broth. With modern technology comes the ability to have soup canned, dehydrated, and sold in vast quantities across the world.

Creating a good soup starts by picking good ingredients and giving them time to cook. Starting with onions is a staple for soups in my family. If you’ve ever had cooked onions before, then it’s simple to say that it’s one of those smells in which you can taste. Like a snake smelling the air with its tongue, I could stick out my tongue and taste the smell of onions simmering. The reason why onions smell so good when cooking is because their sugars and proteins react with one another when exposed to heat (this is called caramelizing) thereby releasing similar molecules found in meat and coffee. The result is a familiar smell molecularly which lets us enjoy what we smell.

After the onions have cooked down to a more translucent color, it’s time to add the rest of the ingredients one by one. The first is usually garlic which is my all-time favorite. Garlic can be a hit or miss for many people. While it packs a hefty punch to flavor, too much and the dish could fall apart (although in my case, I still haven’t found the limit to how much garlic is too much). The best part about garlic is that it is really good for you regardless of its potent smell. Garlic is high in Vitamin C and manganese as well as being low in calories. Garlic helps reduce and regulate blood pressure and there are some reports of it helping you live longer. Just don’t expect anyone to want to be near you after eating a whole clove. Following garlic comes a conglomerate of vegetables that unite with the onions and garlic to form an enticing flavor that will make you not want to wait until the soup is done.

Now the time has come to build the broth. The first broth soup actually dates back 20,000 years ago, once man finally figured out how to water/heatproof their containers. Boiling water wasn’t a widely-used practice before this discovery (obviously). The first broth was most likely a mixture of animal bones, hot rocks and whatever fat fell off of the bones. Not the most appetizing of meals, but it helped Neanderthals from dying by protein poisoning from the meat so that’s a plus.

After filling our pot with water, my dad turns to find some sort of meat to reduce in a separate pot to release the flavors before adding to the rest of the soup. Cooking it prior to the soup allows the meat to fall apart once thrown into the pot. He normally saves some kind of meat from the weekly meals to use. This time it’s chicken. The key to a good soup, in my opinion, is to have the chicken shredded as to have smaller pieces in the soup itself. I think it is easier to eat because I won’t be focused on trying to chew anything, which is helpful whenever I get sick.

There was a study done at the University of Nebraska that put that question to the test: does chicken soup really help you feel better when you’re sick? The short answer: absolutely. The hot liquid of the broth helps move mucus and increase air flow in the body. While there was no conclusive evidence that it was solely the chicken responsible for this remedy, the researchers concluded that there was more of a placebo effect that paired with the healthiness of the soup. There’s an old saying “starve a cold, feed a fever” but this is simply not true. In fact, having soup can not only give you a high intake of vitamins and nutrients, and help you achieve that daily vegetable count, but soups that are broth based will fill you up with more water and lower amounts of calories. While it is enough to help you get better, eating broth-based soup can actually help you lose weight. Similarly, chicken noodle soup helps fight your cold symptoms by keeping your nasal track moist, preventing dehydration and reduce mucus accumulating in the lungs. Basically your average superhero in soup form.

Now comes one of my favorite parts: it’s time to make the noodles. These are homemade are well worth the hassle. Honestly, there should be more people making stuff from scratch because it’s more satisfying to eat knowing how much work went into it. It’s also better because you know what goes into what you make. To make noodles, you have to follow the traditional method of making dough, kneading it, and letting it rise (which doesn’t really matter since this is an all-day process anyway). After the dough has risen, we must roll it out and begin forming our noodles. If you’ve worked with dough before, you know what it feels like: a pile of mush like playdough. When I was little and went to the supermarket with my family, my younger sister and I would poke and squeeze the premade pizza dough making smiley faces and a sun. This is a drier and more dense dough than that. The dough is initially flattened into a thick pancake version of itself before being fed into a small contraption, something like a paper shredder only for food. The key to making noodles is knowing how thick you want to make them. These are going to be a thicker noodle like an egg noodle, my favorite.

Speaking of dough, we have got to have some sort of bread with soup. The two are like salt and pepper. My dad has been making fresh rolls a few times a week, and they are better than anything I could buy at the store. You make the dough and form it into rolls no bigger than a baseball, cover them, and allow them to rise for a while. After they are done and after they bake, the result is fresh rolls that seem to fall apart when you bite into them. Like onions and garlic, there aren’t too many smells like fresh bread products. They are their own definition of a smell. The human nose was thought to have been capable of smelling around 10,000 different smells to which the hippocampus and amygdala would filter out all of the smells that we had stored in our memory as good smells or smells that give a positive reaction. So, we love the smell of things because our brain says we’ve loved them already. That’s why things like freshly baked bread smells so good. The estimated amount of smells now is around 1 trillion. Remember, the nose knows.

Whether it’s Campbell’s, Progresso, or even ramen (different story but still a popular variant of soup) people love the stuff. Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t all that healthy for you depending on your brand. Overall, the problem with canned soups is that they contain a lot of sodium and fat. They can also contain a higher amount of BPA (Bisphenol A) which is used in the liner of most cans and has been shown to lead to a higher cancer risk but there are many more products out that also contain BPA. There are options to get reduced fat and low sodium soups, but believe me and stick to the homemade stuff.

Like a nine to five job, once finished, the aftermath is so rewarding. The noodles were added in sometime in the last hour, giving them time to simmer down and absorb the flavor of the broth. This time, bread-bowls were made. The art of a bread bowl is complex. There needs to be a hard shell while the inside remains soft. If done correctly, the result is an edible bowl that the delicious soup can be ladled into. The soup itself is delicious, tasting only of the chicken, and vegetables lovingly added. There aren’t many feelings in this world that can beat the taste, sound and smell of a rainy Sunday at my house.