TOWER- The daily soup offering at Zup’s Grocery in Tower is the closest thing you can find in town for piping hot take-out food.

For over 11 years, it has been prepared each day, October through May, by Nancy Lilya, who also oversees the other take-out deli food like sandwiches, subs, and salads.

“Lord, no,” Lilya said with a laugh when I asked her if she used a recipe.

The type of soup changes from day to day, and no one but Lilya knows what will be on tap.

“I never know what I am going to make until I get to work in the morning,” she said.

The soup of the day generally takes her between 30-45 minutes to get going. The soup is cooked in a restaurant-sized stock pot, over a two-burner gas stove that sits in the back room of the store. Ingredients come from the store’s shelves and refrigerator cases. Meat and vegetables are cut by hand.

“I started making soup when I was working at Good Ol’ Days,” said Lilya, whose resumé includes plenty of experience with commercial cooking and baking, elementary school teaching, and retail and banking customer service. Lilya was tasked with cooking up soup for the monthly senior bingo event, which was started years ago by Christina Hujanen and is now overseen by the Friends of Vermilion Country School.

Her soups are always a hit at bingo. Selections vary month-to-month, and bingo organizers leave the planning up to Lilya, who seems to know what the seniors will enjoy. She always prepares two types, though one is almost always a chicken-based soup with either egg noodles or dumplings.

Chicken dumpling soup,, chicken wild rice soup, and boiled dinner appear to be the local favorites. She often will get pre-orders from customers who want to bring home a family-size serving of one of their favorites. The soup, kept hot in a kettle all day, is sold self-serve, so customers can take home a cup or two, or more, depending on how many mouths they have to feed.

Her soups all start with a high-quality stock. She recommends using a quality soup base, not bouillon cubes, and she pointed out several brands that are available in the soup aisle. Then, most soups use what seasoned cooks call “the trinity,” a healthy dose of chopped onions, celery, and carrots.

For dumplings, she says the secret is to use an egg, a little bit of water, and then enough flour to make a dough. The dough is then dropped by the teaspoon-full into the simmering soup, about 15 minutes before serving. Lilya likes her dumplings to have some chew in them. For fluffier dumplings, recipes will call for adding some leavening to the flour, she said.

Her soups’ seasonings come almost exclusively from the meat and vegetables added. Soups do need salt, she said, but the soup base provides a good balance of flavor and salt for all the soups she makes. Sometimes she will add peppercorns to her soups, a trick she learned from her mother, Helia Seppala.

“My mother was quite a baker and cook,” she said. “On the days our Lutheran youth group had bake sales at the Pike Co-op, we would stay home all day with her making her famous donuts.” They were so popular, Lilya said, that as soon as a new batch was ready, someone would come pick them up and bring the freshly-fried donuts to the bake sale, and this would go on all day long.

These days, Lilya is known locally for her apple strudel and walnut potica. Back in her heyday, she was known to make as many as 450 strudels and over 100 poticas in a year. She has baked wedding cakes and catered large events.

One of her family favorites is a Slovenian specialty called Zjienkrofe, a meat-filled dumpling. And she still finds time to make some strudel and potica every year.

But after a day working around food, Lilya said she doesn’t cook too much for herself at home anymore. She was widowed several years ago, and her grown son Jacob lives in Virginia.

“I’m not ready to retire,” she said. “I like to get out of the house and enjoying seeing people all day, along with my co-workers.”