Of soup and love, the first is best.
So said the British doctor Thomas Fuller in Gnomologia in 1732. Fortunately, the prospects for love have gotten better since then, but soup is still a smash in the kitchen. And if the way to a person’s heart is through his or her stomach, surely it could lead to love.
After all, what’s better than coming home to a steaming pot of hearty mushroom barley soup on a February day, the scent of onions and mushrooms wafting through the house as evocative as any perfume?
What’s more tantalizing than a decadent cream of asparagus soup in the first days of spring, the green spear long considered an aphrodisiac? What could be more sensuous than a cold cherry consommé on a hot summer night or more warming than sweet potato chili on a frosty fall afternoon?
Soup’s virtues are many, even beyond its potential as a love potion. You can make a double batch and freeze it for a busy day. You can invite over a passel of friends and serve a simple, delicious meal with nothing more than a hearty soup, good bread and a salad. You can wow dinner guests with a fancy starter like watermelon lemongrass soup with crabmeat.
But mostly, soup is fabulous because it’s flexible. I promise you, among what you have on hand in the pantry, your freezer and the fridge, you could make a marvelous soup this minute, no trip to the grocery required.
In fact, that old 1950s warhorse of a cookbook, The Joy of Cooking, suggests saving “bits of bone, cooked meat, chicken carcasses and feet, fish and meat trimmings, vegetable parings, the outer leaves of lettuce, unshapely tomatoes, celery tops, snap bean ends, the lower ends of asparagus, parsley, etc. for the soup pot.”
I don’t. Like any other dish, soup is only as good as the ingredients you use. The fresher your produce, stock and proteins are, the tastier your soup will be. Aging vegetables and past-their-prime meats will yield you a less-than-stellar potage. Trust me on this.
Soups are also easy. They don’t call for much measuring. They usually take less than 30 minutes to prepare (except for simmering, which requires no effort on your part) and they’re open to improvising – sweet potatoes for winter squash, navy beans for cannelloni, vegetable broth for chicken.
In the winter, they’re a surefire vehicle for sneaking beans and root vegetables into your family’s produce-starved diet; in the summer they are a haven of flavor for your overflowing garden.
Local real estate agent and benefactor Debra Parmenter remembers planting zucchini one year, waiting and waiting for them to come up and then being inundated with the dark green cylinders.
“For those of us who have ever had gardens, we love them until we have no idea what to do with all those cute little zucchini,” she said in an email.
In desperation, the native Coloradan was inspired to create her own soup – a summery concoction of sauteed onions, garlic and zucchini doused in chicken stock, smoothed out with sour cream and pureed with the state’s favorite flavoring agent, green chiles. “Add more if you are living in the fast lane,” she notes.
Or do as Jinnifer Long, an accomplished home cook and manager at Natural Grocers does, and break out the slow cooker. She sautes every manner of onion – leeks, onions, scallions, shallots and garlic – in butter before tossing the mixture into the slow cooker with stock, celery seed, different black peppers, smoked salt and Italian seasoning. When she gets home from work, she throws in fresh kale and perhaps carrots and mushrooms and lets them cook for 45 minutes. Voilà – dinner is served.
For many of us, the smell of soup simmering on the stove evokes nostalgic memories of home and hearth.
“We had soup a lot when I was growing up,” said Deborah Uroda, an acclaimed local cook and development director at Inside Durango TV. “It’s so warming and comforting to me. I like the whole process of looking up the recipe and having the aroma waft through the kitchen before you eat.”
She’s rightly famous for her savory, porky, hearty, green chile stew, but she’s multitalented and also makes a killer crab bisque. Uroda almost never eats canned soup any more, but her husband is still fond of Campbell’s. (Aren’t they all? If there’s no chicken noodle soup on hand, it’s not a happy day.)
But no less an august figure than Ludwig van Beethoven swore by the homemade stuff and added an extra requirement, too.
“Only the pure in heart can make a good soup,” he wrote in an 1817 letter to a friend.
As for the rest of us, we’ll just have to soldier on.
For one noted cook and baker, the fun of soup is in the experiment.
“Soups can be as creative as making a beautiful cake,” said Margie Deane Gray, head of the Fort Lewis College Foundation. “Anything you create can be a work of art, it’s how much time you want to put in.”
If she feels like something colorful, she adds carrots and peas. If she’s hankering for something cozy, she adds sage. And at almost any time of year, she starts her soups with a chicken stock base and often the bird itself as an ingredient.
“Chicken barley is a pot of goodness,” she says.
For a hardworking professional like Alison Dance, who owns Cyprus Café, soup can be nothing short of a godsend.
“At a restaurant, when there is often not much time to sit down and enjoy a meal, a cup of soup on the fly can make or break your day,” she wrote in an email.
Her favorites fluctuate with what’s on the menu at the restaurant or what she has time to make at home, from turkey barley at Thanksgiving to the marvelously savory Asian favorite Tom Ka Gai, a chicken, coconut and lime soup.
“I live on soup,” she said.
Now there’s a delicious notion.
phasterok@durangoherald.com
