Soup

I just finished making the weekly soup; on a Sunday or Monday I boil up the kitchen’s odds and ends into a hearty soup and eat it for lunch everyday, invariably with a slab of bread. I like to have soup for lunch. It is nourishing, filling, quick to heat up and requires very little thought or planning after a half hour of chopping and stirring each week. Soup is a good way to crowbar lots of vegetables into one’s diet, likewise protein and fermented foods. We’re always making sausage and sauerkraut soup in one form or another. Kimchi soup is fantastic especially in summer when you want something lighter. Most soups are good with a big blob of live yoghurt on them. 

The beautiful thing about rustic home made soup is that anything goes. The chunkier and more boldly flavoured the better. I never feel bored or uninspired sitting down to a bowl of soup at lunchtime. Indeed some of the meals I remember most fondly are bowels of soup made by friends- leek and potato in rainy Yorkshire, fennel top & sausage in Bristol, chanterelles & corn in southern Oregon, and one of my favourite meals of all time: my mums split pea and ham soup from the 1980s. As a chef in restaurants I used to ask potential cooks to make a soup of their choosing during their trial shift. A clear task to begin to judge a cook’s palate and skills but also a good way to get to know someone.

Certain store cupboard essentials boost your soup arsenal: onions are a must. Garlic and chillis must be kept in abundance at all times for all cuisines; spring onions too, though they are more dispensable. If you think you might be using too much garlic, you’re not. A selection of pulses- lentils;  red for speed of cooking and thickening; green for savoury, wintery ham broths; yellow for depth and heft and stodge. Have spices always on hand, the more the merrier, but use them while they’re fresh and don’t be stingy with them.  I always keep seeds of cumin, coriander, fennel and cardamom by the cooker alongside salt, pepper and olive oil. Powdered turmeric, paprika & mustard should be within easy reach too. Packaged Scottish Broth mix is handy if you have lamb bones or the sweeter root vegetables around, though the green peas never fully cook even with soaking. The cooking water from barley, potatoes, broken pasta, canned chickpeas all make good ersatz stocks when cooked and the solids add thickening and filling qualities to soups. 

Of course the most important thing is a good stock. We use almost exclusively a fairly light chicken stock, simmered for around an hour. The bones can be removed and a second stock made with fresh cold water if you have a particularly generous amount, though usually we don’t bother. For our household we aren’t particularly fussy about a stock recipe and will add other bones if they appear throughout the week- the shank bones form roast lamb, the few wee nubbins left from pork chops. Generally we don’t add aromatics like carrots or onions, preferring to keep them to use in the soups. If I happen to have a slice of ginger and a spare spring onion I will add them  because I have a superstition it makes a cleaner tasting stock. I have no science to back this up, however. We typically buy 3 chickens every week or two, remove the breast and legs for meals and use the remaining carcasses to make stock. This typically yields about 3 litres of good quality delicious chicken stock, most of which is used for the weekly soup. Of course the ethical question of whether one should be able to buy three chickens for £10 remains, but the fact is you can and we do. It works for us.

If you don’t eat meat then your options are somewhat limited for stocks, a vegetable stock can taste quite nice but it carries none of the viscosity or delicious mouth coating rich sensation of meat stock. As said, chickpea water is a good option here. For vegetarian soups I usually eschew the vegetable stocks in favour of putting more vegetables in the actual soup and sweating them very well to extract favour and moisture, but if you have an excess of things like leek greens and fennel tops then you can make use of them in a flavoured water you can add to your soup. I hesitate to call it stock in the true sense of the word. Potato water is also good for soup, though arguably it’s presence implies you a have cooked your potatoes in too much water and with insufficient salt- as the water potatoes boil in should be pretty darn salty, too much to drink it anyway. 

The world of fine dining restaurants in the early 2000s used to be obsessed with extremely smooth purées of vegetables. The idea that an espresso cup of carrot soup should contain within it the very essence of carrots an idea which seemed to permeate British kitchens. Vegetables blended for tens of minutes in machines that cost hundreds or thousands of pounds to an ethereal smoothness that simply screamed “luxurious’ were the standard. Having been initiated into professional cooking with this silky stuff it was with some indignation I was told my carrot soup was “too carroty” a few years into my career. The talented American chef wrinkled her nose and splashed in lashings of chilli paste and bourbon-barrel-aged fish sauce into my symphony of carrot. The lesson being that one hard and fast rule in a few of the kitchens you might encounter doesn’t translate globally. I am glad I learned this lesson, though it took me some time to appreciate it.

Nowadays I find the pureéd soup a barren landscape, a Rothko monotone, suited perhaps to galleries of haute cuisine but not to my lunch.  I am far more likely to swish the hot sauce and fish sauce around than the cream and butter. Give me chunks, bits, interest; make me go diving with my spoon and see what treasures I might dredge up. I don’t want luxury for lunch, I want contrasting textures & colours of all sorts. I also want to make my soup at the start of the week just before the new provisions arrive. To absolutely empty my fridge of meat-ends, cooked pulses, wilting veggies and so on. It’s not a garbage can but a melting pot; better for the more variety you can contain within. it’s amazing the unifying work a good chicken stock and a judicious spice selection will perform on seemingly disparate ingredients . 

I once had a job making about 100 portions of breakfast and lunch for a crew of ship builders in Leith. Breakfast was rolls of the usual sort- bacon, sausage, black pudding & haggis. Lunch was a different soup everyday. One day half the crew missed breakfast for some reason and a raft of breakfast meats came back to the kitchen, untouched. I barely hesitated. Into the bubbling fifty litre pot they went with some onions and couple of catering tins of tomatoes. Brought to a boil and blended to some refinement with an enormous immersion blender. I questioned my integrity briefly before sending it off to be served. I needn’t have worried, it was by far the most complimented and requested soup of the entire two week contract.