Soup, glorious soup
ONLY THE PURE OF HEART CAN MAKE GOOD SOUP - BEETHOVEN
"Beautiful soup, so rich and green Waiting in a hot tureen! Who for such dainties would not stoop? Soup of the evening, beautiful soup! Beautiful soup! Who cares for fish Game, or any other dish? Who would not give all else for two Pennyworth of beautiful soup?"
Lewis Carroll - Alice in Wonderland
"To feel safe and warm on a cold wet night, all you really need is soup" Laurie Colwin
It's a miserable day. The rain is pouring down and it's cold. I was going to do something with chicken for dinner, but as I drove along in the wet on the way back from my Italian lesson, my thoughts turned to soup. There is something so gloriously comforting about soup. And I don't think it's something that is just English - indeed the English are perhaps not that good at it. We don't have a lot of famous ones - Cock-a-leekie, after all, is Scottish. As Jamie Oliver in his Jamie's Dinners book (the one in which he tackled school dinners), rhapsodises - soup can tell us so much about the culture it comes from, so I'm not sure what it says about the English.
Although my mother was a good cook and made some very tasty stews, I do not think I remember her making soup - or grandma either. We had soup out of cans and packets - I remember Campbells - or was it Heinz? Tomato Soup, which if I think hard, I can still taste. It was sweetish I think, so probably loaded with sugar. A home staple of the post-war years immortalised by Andy Warhol of course. The packet soup I remember was a cream of onion - I think you added hot water and heated it up on the stove. I cringe to think about it now and I do wonder why my mother did not make her own soup. Because she was a very good cook and soup is such a good way to make a meal out of not very much - remember this was the time of rationing, quite apart from the fact that we did not have much money anyway.
Indeed the danger with making soup is that you just clear out your fridge and put everything in a pot with some water in the hope that the end result will be tasty soup. Elizabeth David is very derogatory about this and tells the story of being shown how to do this, when the contents of the fridge included leftover salad and some pickled herring. She was very rightly appalled. Yes you can make soup out of this and that, but, as always, you need to know what to use and what not to use and what to put with what. She has some sound and practical advice of a general nature about soup making:
"in regard to the wisdom or otherwise of mixing too many ingredients, however good, to make one soup; the likelihood is that they will cancel each other out, so that although your soup may be a concentrated essence of good and nourishing ingredients, it will not taste of anything in particular. Secondly, one has to learn in the end that the creative urge in the matter of embellishments is best kept under control. If your soup is already very good of its kind, possessed of its own true taste, will it not perhaps be spoilt by the addition of a few chopped olives, of a little piece of diced sausage, of a spoonful of paprika pepper? These are matters which everyone must decide for himself."
My own epiphany on soup making came in France, where every evening dinner consisted of a bowl of freshly made soup. It was made from whatever vegetable was at hand - generally no more than one or two ingredients - cooked with water and then put through a mouli (a potato ricer) and served with a dob of butter on top and some gorgeous french bread. They were delicious - and the soup in the picture at the top of the page - Purée Leontine from Elizabeth David - is typical of this kind of soup. It's one of my favourite kind of soups, although my husband prefers unpuréed soup of the minestrone kind, so we don't perhaps have it as often as I would like. Opinion from the experts seems to vary as to whether you should use stock or water for the liquid.
Soup spans the whole of society - from the soup kitchens of the poor to the tables of the aristocrats. Perhaps the fact that it can be associated with the very poor is one reason why it is often perceived as not being very high-class. The soup kitchen has been around for a long time - Van Gogh being one of the artists who chose it as a subject. Why soup for the poor? Well it is cheap and it is nourishing - if you have enough ingredients anyway. And it can be made from just about anything. There's even the famous fairy story about stone soup. And even a really basic soup can be a very tasty meal.
If you've got an attractive tureen full of comforting, inviting home-made soup on the table - with home-made bread, butter, a hunk of cheese ad some fruit - who's going to notice the absence of meat or fish or any other main course?" Delia Smith
But there are expensive, and tricky soups as well as a basic broth made from chicken bones with some kind of vegetable thrown in. Lobster bisque, the notorious and ghastly shark's fin soup, soup with caviar, with truffles - or simply just exquisitely concocted combinations of flavour. I vaguely remember somebody describing Robert Carrier's sorrel soup as 'un poème'. And I find that often, in a posh restaurant the tiny 'free' taste that they give you before the meal is a soup of some kind. And it's often the best thing you have. And even those peasant soups of the past have been raised to the level of haute cuisine - bouillabaisse, vichyssoise, gazpacho to name just a few.
I think the subject of soup around the world and its thousands of variations is something for another post. Another time.
In the meantime I'm looking for comfort on a miserable day and soup hits the spot. I'll see what I have in the vegetable drawer - some beans I think and tomatoes, with maybe a carrot and/or potato and/or leek and/or celery. And I might make a yummy focaccia to go with it. Looking forward to it already.
"Soup puts the heart at ease, calms down the violence of hunger, eliminates the tension of the day, and awakens and refines the appetite." Auguste Escoffier
And I hope my husband doesn't think like Dylan Moran:
"I think that women just have a primeval instinct to make soup, which they will try to foist on anybody who looks like a likely candidate." Dylan Moran
Surely not. A primeval instinct? Makes it sound erotic somehow.
