It was an Arkansas tradition. If you were going to Hot Springs, you had to stop by Mollie’s and see how the chicken soup measured up. Complete with a matzo ball or two or three. Were they light as a cloud, the way the more refined like them? Or weighty enough to fire at an oncoming enemy with devastating effect? Tastes differ.

Maybe you’d like to try the beet borscht with a plop of sour cream just to get you started? Or the sweet-and-sour red cabbage soup? Oy, a mechiyah! What a pleasure! Or as we say in Arkinsaw, it’d make you slap your grandma!

That cabbage soup tasted just like home. Ma used to throw some raisins in hers a la russe. There was no meat in Mollie’s version, but the key ingredients may have been the beef bones in the broth. Whatever the secret, it was good and good for you.

Or perhaps you’d prefer a nice knish maybe, with a little kasha? What am I doing, asking! Listen to me – a healthy person you don’t ask, you just give.

Here, have some kreplach (Jewish won-ton) floating in chicken soup. Or maybe a blob of chopped chicken liver held together with enough shmaltz to clog a small river. (There’s no accounting for tastes.) Maybe a bagel-mit-lox and, of course, Philadelphia cream cheese. Mollie’s was a menu designed to give a cardiologist fits. Arteries didn’t stand a chance.

Ah, those were the days – and Alka-Seltzered nights when you’d overdone it. But it wasn’t just the food that made Mollie’s warm, cozy and inviting, but the whole, maternal aura. For many, the food was an introduction to soul food of a different order. For others, a serving of nostalgia.

Someone once described nostalgia as homesickness for the past, and now Mollie’s is part of that past. It closed its doors the other day, and the news got me started thinking about great Reubens I have known and devoured over the years, and when and where. I really should have kept a scrapbook. Mollie’s would have shared billing with the Carnegie Deli in Manhattan. And the places along old Maxwell Street in Chicago, now gone along with its pushcarts and pullers. (Puller: A street hawker whose job was to attract/pull customers into a shop.) And now Mollie’s is gone, too.

“I miss it,” says Betty Forshberg, Mollie’s owner and the daughter-in-law of the original Mollie. But, nu, what can you do when you’re caught between hard times and chain restaurants? Things change. (Insert heartfelt sigh here.) But there are some things that don’t change, like memories of past repasts. No, no, they can’t take that away from me.

Comfort food was seldom so comfortable as at Mollie’s. Now we take our consolation at another Hot Springs institution, R-R-R-Rolando’s Restaurante on Central Avenue. (The Rs must be trilled.) Try the tortilla soup with fresh tortilla strips. Full of vitamins, minerals and potlikker. Ecuador in Arkansas! Ethnicities change, appetite remains.

Some of us can still remember when Mollie’s, too, was downtown on Central somewhere in the strange mix with the auction house, IQ Zoo (featuring a chicken who could count), the Ohio Club with its illegal slots, a pancake house, amphibious landing craft fresh from World War II, a wax museum, gypsy fortune teller’s, art gallery and auction house, news stand and who knows what else.

If a man were of a mind to, he could pick up a meal, racing form, awful antique and/or loathsome disease on a single morning stroll down Central–and make it back in time for a day at the races. Or the baths. As the song says, those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end.

Central Avenue was always a mix of the wholesome and not so, of carnival midway and middlebrow. By now, of course, the slots at the old Ohio Club have been succeeded by the “games of skill” at the racetrack. Everything’s changed and nothing has.

How tame Central seems to have grown, with toy stores and lovingly restored Bathhouse Row. Happily, the reformers didn’t mess with the food in Spa City. And they opened the way for the Hot Springs of family fun and second homes on the lake.

All good things having to end, Mollie’s itself is now a memory. But a mouth-watering one.

You should only be well, Mrs. Forshberg, and maybe from time to time you could make us some of that cabbage soup? These days, when vegetables are all the rage, it would fit right in.

© 2008 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.