The Soup Is Orange

The box said CARROTS, and the box was telling the truth. I just hadn’t expected the carrots inside it to be purple.

“Rocco,” I said. “Come and look at this.”

He came over with the knife still in his hand and looked into the box for about four seconds.

“Purple,” he said.

“Fifteen kilos of purple. Every single one.”

He picked one up and turned it around slowly, the way you’d hold a phone that had stopped working. “The soup is orange. The soup has been orange since we opened.”

“I know.”

“Service is in fifty minutes. Ndidi, call the farmer.”

I called the farmer, who had taken over the fields near Ely in March. He was cheerful about it. He said the purple ones were the old variety, that his grandfather used to grow nothing else, that they were sweeter than the orange ones, and did we want fifteen more kilos next week.

Rocco peeled one while I was on the phone. It was purple in the middle too.

“We could peel them harder,” he said.

“That isn’t how carrots work.”

He cut a piece and ate it. He chewed it for a long time, and I watched his face, which is not a face that hides anything.

“It’s better,” he said.

“So we serve purple soup.”

“We serve purple soup.”

At seven the board outside Vergani’s said SOUP OF THE DAY: PURPLE CARROT. By half past eight we had sold thirty-one bowls, which is twice what we normally sell on a Tuesday. Our regular, the man who has complained about the soup every Tuesday since we opened, put his spoon down and asked what we had changed.

Rocco came out of the kitchen, still holding the knife, and told him the truth.

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s the same soup. We just used to have the wrong carrots.”