An Exaltation of Soups – Read Now and Download Mobi

To Mother and Dad

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

TO MY MIND, when you talk about soup, you’re talking about so much more than a mostly liquid way of filling your stomach.

Consider the story of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at dinner in Japan with Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki. Mrs. Gandhi was served a clear soup in a dark bowl painted inside with pictures of the bamboo tree. Only a few vegetables and a single pigeon egg were floated in the broth, leaving the bowl’s design visible. Mr. Suzuki asked her what she thought of the presentation. Instantly Mrs. Gandhi replied: “To my eyes, it [the egg] is a full moon shining over a dark forest on a clear night.” Prime Minister Suzuki sat up straight, completely amazed at her spontaneous and accurate reply.

I like this story a lot because it captures in one fell swoop all the layers of purpose held in a bowl of soup: its edibility, yes, but also its intrinsic beauty, its identification with specific cultures, its universality, and its resonance on the most basic levels.

After all, what is the broth but salt and water—the sea, the source of all life? What are the ingredients in the soup but fauna and flora that man, oh so painfully and over millennia, domesticated, tamed, made his own, and sacrificed as food for his own survival? The soup served by Suzuki was quintessentially Japanese, symbolizing that country’s cultural aesthetic and Buddhist values, and at the same time universal, so that it could evoke Mrs. Gandhi’s intuitive reaction.

Look at a bowl of soup and see the evolution of foods created in remote locations over thousands and thousands of years, made into recipes passed from hand to hand, transported on the backs of Indian, Asian, and Arab traders, Roman soldiers, and European explorers, all the way to your supermarket.

Eat a bowl of soup and savor mouthfuls of human resolve since Neolithic times to bring warmth, health, and richness into the lives of their family members, their tribe, their community, their culture.

Consider a bowl of soup from any culture, and think how it came to reflect that specific people, their times of celebration, their passages of life, their most intimate life experiences.

That’s what An Exaltation of Soups is all about. In these pages are the stories and recipes of both soups and soup traditions that most profoundly connect people all over the world. I began the collection many years ago out of sheer love of food and, yes, sheer love of research, too. An initial batch of interesting soup recipes evolved into a loose-leaf cookbook on top of my refrigerator, and this grew thick with notes and glosses as I stumbled over stories and histories and quotes that illustrated the soups and their ingredients. Over time, this raggy book seemed to take on a life of its own, naturally shaping itself into storied recipes that gave insight into the cultures from which they sprang. And when I translated it in 1997 into an ordered website at www.soupsong.com, the floodgates opened: readers from around the world commented on, corrected, refined, and authenticated my materials. It’s been a long, rewarding journey for me, really an exaltation of good food, good friends, warmth, and insight—an exaltation of soup. I hope you find in this book the long-lost recipe of the soup your great-great-grandmother used to make to celebrate a family wedding, and I hope you find a wealth of other recipes that will inspire you to share warmth, food, and fellowship with all the people in your life.

PART I

“AMAZING SOUP”

—JERRY NEWMAN, contemporary Canadian poet and novelist

1
THE ORIGINS AND HISTORY OF SOUP

STONE AGE PEOPLE created soup before they had a pot to cook it in, a bowl to serve it in, or a gourd to drink it from.

In fact, it’s not completely clear who first stumbled onto the concept of soup—anthropologists disagree, depending on their interpretation of existing artifacts. Some say it was one of the Homo sapiens gang, sometime after 80,000 B.C.E.—either the Neanderthals or the Cro-Magnons who ultimately did those poor Neanderthals in. Others argue for a later generation—Neolithic man, around 10,000 B.C.E.

I kind of like the Neanderthal theory. It was a particularly tough and dangerous world back then. These hunter-gatherers were stuck in the last blast of an Ice Age that killed off much of their food and many species. It was every man for himself as the Neanderthals ran fearfully from—and ran hungrily after—woolly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, wolves, and other hominids. And yet Neanderthal skeletons have been found in France with teeth worn down below gum level—and deeply crippled skeletons have been found, too. This means that some older or sickly prehistoric men and women were kept alive only through the compassion of their communities and the brilliance of someone who could create hot and soupy food alternatives to incredibly cold indigestible plants and tough meat.

I try to put myself under the toque of that Stone Age Julia Child. I imagine him or her using bark to dip and carry water … putting food in the water and noticing it soften or swell … marking how plants and berries, meat and marrow chunks would infuse the water with color and flavor. I imagine him or her getting the idea of warming the broth from the warm mother’s milk that kept little Neanderthal babies happy.

HERODOTUS ON SCYTHIANS BOILING SOUP IN ANIMAL SKINS, CIRCA 440 B.C.E.

If they do not happen to possess a cauldron, they make the animal’s paunch hold the flesh, and pouring in at the same time a little water, lay the bones under and light them. The bones burn beautifully; and the paunch easily contains all the flesh when it is stript from the bones, so that by this plan your ox is made to boil himself, and other victims also to do the like.

—HERODOTUS, fifth-century B.C.E. Greek historian, Book IV, THE HISTORIES

Soup! It’s an unbelievable achievement—a matter of thought overreaching what was technologically possible at the time. In the words of anthropologist Sally McBrearty: “The earliest Homo sapiens probably had the cognitive capability to invent Sputnik … but didn’t yet have the history of invention or a need for those things.” But soup? Yes, he needed soup. He needed soup, so he imagined soup. He imagined soup, and he brought it into being, despite his lack of pots to cook it in.

In fact, soup turned out to be a transforming concept that changed early man’s relationship to nature, increased his life choices, and created completely new needs and desires. One eon he’s a vegetarian in the garden of Eden, the next he’s scavenging or hunting raw flesh and sucking bone marrow … then, almost suddenly, he’s figured out an unbelievably complex process with tools to produce a hot meal. It’s a gastronomic miracle, and it’s art: multiple colors, multiple textures, multiple flavors—something created by man that had never existed before in the history of the world.

But how on earth could early man in 10,000 B.C.E., at the latest, have boiled things … without the pottery that he finally created in 6000 B.C.E. and the cauldrons that followed in 3600 B.C.E.?

HOW CAN YOU MAKE SOUP WITHOUT POTS?

I propose two theories.

First, prehistoric man might have boiled animals in their skins. He could have flayed his prey, suspending the skin on forked sticks, filling the bag with water and food, and lighting a fire underneath. The skin would not catch fire because it would be cooked by the boiling water on the inside (but don’t try this trick at home). In fact, this technique has been used by many cultures in recorded history, from Scythians in the fifth century B.C.E. to Irish and Scots in the sixteenth century.

Second, our ancestors might have used the “hot stone” method. First you dig a hole or find one, and fill it with water. Then you build a fire close by and heat stones in it. Then, one by one, and v-e-r-y carefully, you transfer the stones to the water until it boils. And it will. Stones can be heated to a temperature of 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit in a well-laid hearth. How do I know that? Because in 1954, archeologist Michael J. O’Kelly proved it in experiments with his students at primeval Irish sites: “They used the hearths to heat stones, used a dampened wooden shovel to dump them in the water, brought the water to a boil, and simmered a 10-pound leg of mutton for 3 hours 40 minutes by adding stones every few minutes…. Then they ate the results: ‘excellently cooked and most tasty.’ ”^*

WHAT WENT INTO THE EARLIEST SOUPS?

After those first catch-as-catch-can soups of wild plants and animals, and after vast fields of grain sprang up in Europe and Asia, it turned out to be grains and beans—early man’s first agricultural triumphs in Neolithic times—that went into soup. By 7000 B.C.E., Emmer wheat had been domesticated in Turkey, and barley, millet, and beans in Greece. By 5000 B.C.E., rice was being cultivated in China. These were the stuff of early soups. And, of course, these remain our most revered modern comfort foods. Read on.

GRAINS COOKED IN BROTH continue to be lovingly prepared in most cultures: porridges and gruels from ground wheat; couscous soups and farina soups; barley soups and tsampas; oatmeal soups and rice congee. Imagine the astonished look on ancient man’s face when he first witnessed the miracle of chemistry—when heating caused these cereal grains to release starch granules into the broth and make it thick.

“THE TOLLUND MAN”

… Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.

In the flat country near by
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach….

Out here in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.

—SEAMUS HEANEY, contemporary Irish poet

Bean/pea soup was in vogue long before Esau sold his birthright for it (that biblical “mess of pottage” was lentil soup), and it is an established part of every cuisine in the world without exception—every one! From feijoada in Brazil, to huku ne dovi in Zimbabwe, to misoshiru in Japan, and everything in between.

And then there’s the ancient variation of ground wheat made into a bread that turns so hard without today’s modern preservatives that it can be made edible again only by pouring boiling broth over it. I know this bread from the years I spent living in Morocco: that marvelous freshly baked kisra—a thick Frisbee of chewy bread—would turn to stone in twenty-four hours. This is called “sop” when dunked in hot liquid and is the origin of our words soup, soupe, sup, sopa, soppe, zuppe, shorba, çorbasi. This combination is the basis of Portuguese sopa secos and asordas; Arabic shorbas; Spanish garlic soup; French panades, onion soup, and garbure; Italian aquacotta; Danish ollebrod, Estonian leivasupp, and French l’aïgo boulido. You’ll find an Egyptian fatta soup whose very name means to break crisped pita bread into food.

So there you have it. This part of our everyday cuisine, this soup that we take so much for granted, began life as a miracle of intellection, kept humankind alive through extremes of privation over the ages, and now serves to bind our common humanity, nurse our ills, and mark life’s passages.

When I ponder soup, I think of ancient Tollund Man, dug out of a Danish peat bog in the 1950s and perfectly preserved. He’d been ritually sacrificed to the gods—strangled—but first given a fine last meal, still intact in his stomach. What was it? You know what it was: it was soup. A thick soup of grain and weed seeds ground in a hand mill and boiled.

^* M. J. O’Kelly, “Excavations and Experiments in Early Irish Cooking-Places,” Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquities in Ireland (1954), 84, 105–55.

2
PROVERBIALLY SOUP

IN THE SOUP

“Oh, you are SO full of soup!”

“No, not at all. Alas, after what I did last night, with all the best intentions, I’m actually in the soup.”

“Ah, and crying in your soup, no doubt. What happened?”

“The usual: too many cooks spoiled the broth.”

“Oh right, it’s always so easy to blame others for your own mistakes: the chicken always blames the soup pot for its tragic end.”

“I protest! You aren’t seeing both sides. Remember, the bowl cannot be warmer than the soup.”

“Protest away, but I still say that whatever is put in the soup kettle comes out on the spoon.”

“You are so hard-hearted. And yet, I admit that it’s been hard eating all this bad soup with a big spoon.”

“Well, you know what they say, ‘a spoon does not know the taste of soup, nor a learned fool the taste of wisdom.’ ”

“Ouch, give me a break, doll. And yet I’ve learned my lesson: He who once burns his mouth, always blows the soup.”

PHEW. TEN SOUP PROVERBS from as many different countries. Proverbs sure are funny things. You wouldn’t believe the ink exhausted by scholars of proverbs (yes, they do exist and are called paremiologists) just trying to define the damn things:

“Old gems of generationally tested wisdom”

“The smallest genre of verbal folklore”

“The wit of one; the wisdom of many”

“A condensed allegory”

“The edged tools of speech”

Paremiologically speaking, here’s my favorite, from Bartlett Jere Whiting’s The Nature of the Proverb: “A proverb is an expression which, owing its birth to the people, testifies to its origin in form and phrase. It expresses what is apparently a fundamental truth—that is, a truism—in homely language, often adorned, however, with alliterations and rhyme. It is usually short, but need not be; it is usually true, but need not be. Some proverbs have both a literal meaning and a figurative meaning, either of which makes perfect sense; but more often they have but one of the two.”

In short, there’s a lot of soup in them thar proverbs and a lot of proverbs about soup, and I think there’s good reason why.

Let me take you back in the history of the world. It wasn’t always like it is now, people hunched in front of computers munching on take-out pizzas and creating high-tech proverbs about “garbage in, garbage out.” Stay with me here.

Once upon a time, people came home to a hearth and a cooking pot and made conversation in flickering firelight about the events of the day. Young people would speak up naively or impatiently, “I can’t believe the corn hasn’t started sprouting!” Older folks would philosophically gaze into the simmering dinner, thinking about the unsprouting corn and their own hunger, and opine, “A watched pot never boils.” Bingo, proverb.

It’s nice to think about, isn’t it—that time of apparently slower natural rhythms? When was the last time you gathered things from the garden, built a fire, brought water to a boil, and, hungry and expectant, thought about how these processes spoke to the larger questions that tug at the heartstrings of mankind? There is something beautiful about rituals building metaphors for life and finding room for reflection.

As Mr. Whiting said, though, some proverbs are just talking about that liquid stuff in a bowl, pure and simple:

“Eat soup first and eat it last, and live till a hundred years be passed.” (FRANCE)

“To make a good soup, the pot must only simmer or ‘smile.’” (FRANCE)

“A good soup attracts seats.” (GHANA)

“A house without soup is an unlucky house.” (RUSSIA)

“Of soup and love, the first is best.” (SPAIN)

“Troubles are easier to take with soup than without.” (YIDDISH)

“Good broth will resurrect the dead.” (SOUTH AMERICA)

“Broth to a cook is voice to a singer.” (CHINA)

Other proverbs are still about soup pure and simple, but they imply other things, too:

“A soup that tastes good by licking must taste better by eating.” (AFRICAN ANNANG TRIBE)

“Plenty fish or meat does not spoil the soup.” (GHANA)

“Cheap meat never makes good soup.” (AZERBAIJAN)

“If there are two cooks in one house, the soup is either too salty or too cold.” (IRAN)

“The best soup is made of old meat.” (FRANCE)

“Ye who buy cheap meat will regret when you taste its broth.” (SYRIA)

“One cannot make soup out of beauty.” (ESTONIA)

“Too many peas spoil the soup.” (UNITED STATES)

“He who stirs the soup pot eats first.” (UNITED STATES)

“If they can’t eat the soup, they can spit in it.” (HAITI)

“The more eggs, the thicker the soup.” (BRAZIL)

“Soup is cooked hotter than it’s eaten.” (GERMANY)

And then there are those proverbs that, with a leap of imagination, use the image of soup to express a truth that really has nothing to do with soup at all:

“A rat’s droppings can spoil a whole cauldron of soup.” (CHINA)

“The chicken in the coop has grain, but the soup pot is near; the wild crane has none, but its world is vast.” (CHINA)

“The disobedient chicken obeys in a pot of soup.” (BENIN)

“It is only the bones that rattle in the pot.” (LEBANON)

“If a man makes soup of his tears, ask him not for broth.” (AFRICA)

“Between the hand and mouth, the soup is lost.” (ITALY)

“The broth is cooking, and now we have to act as one.” (BEDOUIN)

“When it rains soup, the poor man has no spoon.” (SWEDEN)

“Better no spoon than no soup.” (GERMANY)

“Boil stones in butter and the broth will be good.” (SCOTLAND)

“In your neighbor’s soup, there is always one fatty morsel.” (IRAN)

“From all the fish in the pot, you can only make one soup.” (MADAGASCAR)

And remember the “lesson learned” (GERMANY) about the burned mouth blowing soup in the opening story? Here are more of the same:

“One who has been burned by the soup begins to blow on the yogurt.” (SAUDI ARABIA)

“Having learned his lesson with hot soup, he blows cold fish salad.” (JAPAN)

“Who has been scalded with hot soup blows on cold water.” (RUSSIA)

“He who burnt himself with soup blows also in the sour milk.” (ROMANIA)

So, all around the world, everyday language for a variety of circumstances is peppered with proverbs, and often these proverbs refer to food … and soup. Is it any wonder, then, that food—and soup in particular—is a major operative in the conventional wisdom of proverbs, the very recipes of culture?

3
SOUP REFLECTIONS

SOUP AS HUMOR

Well, dinner would have been splendid if the wine had been as cold as the soup, the beef as rare as the service, the brandy as old as the fish, and the maid as willing as the Duchess.

—WINSTON CHURCHILL, twentieth-century British statesman

It looks like a tortoiseshell cat having a fit in a bowl of tomato soup.

—MARK TWAIN, nineteenth-century American humorist,
about a J. M. W. Turner landscape painting

Sex is like eating a meal. Sometimes you just want a bowl of soup, and other times you want the three-course meal.

—ELIZABETH HUSS, contemporary American sex therapist

Marriage is the meal where soup is better than the dessert.

—AUSTIN O’MALLEY, early-twentieth-century
American medical writer

Memories are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It’s best not to stir them.

—P. G. WODEHOUSE, twentieth-century English humorist

SOUP AS A CAUSE OF PLEASURE AND GOODNESS

Whenever I sit with a bowl of soup before me, listening to the murmur that penetrates like the distant song of an insect, lost in contemplation of the flavors to come, I feel as if I were being drawn into a trance.

—JUNICHIRO TANIZAKI, twentieth-century Japanese novelist,
In Praise of Shadows

I’m now painting with all the élan of a Marseillais eating soup, which won’t surprise you when I tell you I’m painting large sunflowers.

—VINCENT VAN GOGH, nineteenth-century Dutch artist,
writing to his brother Theo in 1888

Do you have a kinder, more adaptable friend in the food world than soup? Who soothes you when you are ill? Who refuses to leave you when you are impoverished and stretches its resources to give you a hearty sustenance and cheer? Who warms you in the winter and cools you in the summer? Yet who also is capable of doing honor to your richest table and impressing your most demanding guests?… Soup does its loyal best, no matter what undignified conditions are imposed upon it. You don’t catch steak hanging around when you’re poor and sick, do you?

—MISS MANNERS (JUDITH MARTIN), contemporary American
etiquette columnist

What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It’s a sure thing! It’s a sure thing in a world where nothing is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles.

—NORA EPHRON, contemporary American food writer

SOUP AS A MEANS OF SURVIVAL

An army travels on its stomach. Soup makes the soldier.

—NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, nineteenth-century
French emperor

When we were growing up, we were so poor that our heritage was the only thing we had. Mama would say, “Kids, pour more water in the soup. Better days are coming.”

—ASHLEY JUDD, contemporary American actress

When I see a shipwreck, I like to know what caused the disaster … [I learned] nothing but the glow that wrapped her face when the soup came. That’s the story.

—O. HENRY (WILLIAM SYDNEY PORTER),
nineteenth-century American short story writer,
about bringing a homeless woman home to dinner

SOUPS AS AN AID IN ECONOMY

Of Soups: no good housewife has any pretensions to rational economy who boils animal food without converting the broth into some sort of soup.

—MARGARET HUNTINGDON HOOKER,
The Gentlewoman’s Housewifery, 1896

SOUP ETIQUETTE

It is usual to commence with soup, which never refuse…. When all are seated, send a plate of soup to every one. Do not ask anyone if they will be helped, as everyone takes it, of course.

—AN AMERICAN LADY, True Politeness, 1853

Good manners: The noise you don’t make when you’re eating soup.

—BENNETT CERF, twentieth-century American humorist

In taking soup, it is necessary to avoid lifting too much in the spoon, or filling the mouth so full as to stop the breath.

—ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST DE LA SALLE, French educator,
The Rules of Christian Manners and Civility, 1695

Gentlemen do not take soup at luncheon.

—LORD CURZON, nineteenth-century British statesman

Never blow your soup if it is too hot, but wait until it cools. Never raise your plate to your lips, but eat it with a spoon.

—C. B. HARTLEY, The Gentlemen’s Book of Etiquette, 1873

I discovered that dinners follow the order of creation—fish first, then entrées, then joints, lastly the apple as dessert. The soup is chaos.

—SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER, twentieth-century English writer

SOUP PHILOSOPHY

What an awful thing life is. It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.

—GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, nineteenth-century French writer

Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men…. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?

—G. C. LICHTENBERG, eighteenth-century German physicist/
philosopher, Aphorism 14

A first-rate soup is more creative than a second rate painting.

—ABRAHAM MASLOW, twentieth-century American psychologist

I believe I once considerably scandalized her by declaring that clear soup was a more important factor in life than a clear conscience.

—SAKI (H. H. MUNRO), The Blind Spot, 1914

There are two types of people in this world: shlemiehls and shlimazls. A shlemiehl is the person who always spills soup, and a shlimazl is the person he spills it on. I’m the schlemiehl and you’re the shlimazl.

—JEWISH BERNSTEIN talking to archconservative
Archie Bunker on the 1970s U.S. sitcom All in the Family

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

—H. L. MENCKEN, American journalist/critic, Chrestomathy, 1949

Soup and fish explain half the emotions of life.

—SYDNEY SMITH, nineteenth-century
English clergyman and wit

Whoever tells a lie cannot be pure in heart—and only the pure in heart can make good soup.

—LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN, German composer, in a letter to
Mme. Streicher in 1817

4
STOCKS AND FOUNDATIONS

HOMEMADE STOCKS MAKE a difference. And it’s nice to use up those vegetable scraps, those chicken backs, those choking fish bones that drive the kids crazy, by boiling them. The smell of roasting veal, beef, even lamb bones is divine, and when these are simmered into broth with fragrant roots and herbs, they fill the house with memories of meals and shared times that make the most chaotic household feel the comfort of easier, slower days.

But professional soup bases, bouillon cubes, bags of powdered stock, concentrates, and canned stocks work, too—and produce wonderful soups that are well flavored and belie hours of kitchen work that never took place. No one would quarrel with the results. I swear.

I will give you the choice throughout this book whenever possible, although some traditional recipes insist on being started from scratch. By all means, when you are pressed for time, take the excellent shortcuts that are offered on the shelves of your local market. But when you’ve got the time and the place and are in the mood, I hope you’ll dig into the recipes below to get back in touch with your primordial self. Please note that you may halve or double these stock recipes according to your needs and achieve the same quality result.

A COUPLE OF CAUTIONS ON COMMERCIAL STOCK PREPARATIONS

• Because canned and cube stocks are usually saltier than homemade stocks, be sure to taste your soup before you season it—and reduce salt additions accordingly.

• As a matter of interest to weight watchers, canned chicken broth has twice as many calories as canned beef broth.

A FEW DEFLNITIONS

• Stock is the liquid extracted from foods slowly cooked in water and/or wine and used as a foundation for soup and other things. In olden days, it was the “never-ending” broth that was kept going year-round in the back of farmhouse fires, cooked in large iron kettles, with little bits of this and little bits of that meat and vegetable scraps added just about every day.

• Broth is an English term for the liquid extracted from meat cooked slowly with water, which is then concentrated and used either as a foundation for soup or as a simple soup itself (pretty much like the French bouillon and the Italian brodo).

• Consommé is a double-strength stock “finished” into a clear soup.

• Double consommé is a consommé that has been clarified (for instructions). When the stock is boiled down further, it becomes, progressively, a flavoring, an essence, and a glaze.

TIP: If you freeze stock in ice cube trays, you can pop the cubes into plastic bags and use as much or as little as you want at any time.

STOCK QUOTATIONS

Stock to a cook is voice to a singer.

—ANONYMOUS

You must observe in all broths and soups that one thing does not taste more than another, but that the taste be equal, and it has a fine agreeable relish, according to what you design it for; and you must be sure that all greens and herbs you put in be cleaned, washed, and picked.

—HANNAH GLASSE,
THE ART OF COOKERY MADE PLAIN
AND EASY, 1747

COOLING STOCK

Always cool stock uncovered. If you cover it, you’ll delay the cooling process and end up with cloudy stock.

FISH STOCK

Makes 8 cups

2 medium onions, chopped

2 carrots, trimmed, scrubbed, and chopped

2 celery stalks with leaves, chopped

8 to 10 cups cold water

Twist of lemon peel

Salt and white pepper to taste

1 bay leaf

2 to 3 pounds of fish trimmings, heads, and bones, even shrimp shells

Up to 1 cup white wine (optional)

TO PREPARE

Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

1. In a large soup pot, bring all the ingredients to a boil over medium heat, skimming as necessary. Partially cover and cook over medium heat for 20 to 30 minutes.

2. Strain the stock, discarding the solids. If you’re not going to use the stock immediately, cool it down quickly, uncovered, and then either refrigerate it or freeze it for later use.

VEGETABLE STOCK

Makes 8 cups

5 carrots, trimmed, scrubbed, and chopped

2 celery stalks with leaves, chopped

2 medium onions, chopped

1 garlic head, unpeeled and cut in half widthwise

Potato peelings (wash potatoes before peeling)

1 turnip, peeled and sliced

Any wilted veggies in the fridge, chopped, avoiding ones that are strongly flavored (like cabbage) or strongly colored (like beets)

1 bay leaf

Handful of fresh parsley

1 teaspoon each salt and peppercorns, plus additional salt to taste

12 cups (3 quarts) water

TO PREPARE

Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

1. In a large soup pot, bring all the ingredients to a boil over medium-high heat, then reduce the heat to low and cook gently, uncovered, for 45 minutes to 1 hour.

2. Strain the stock, discarding the solids. Season with salt. If you’re not going to use the stock immediately, cool it down quickly, uncovered, and then either refrigerate it or freeze it for later use.

NOTE: If you want darker broth, brown the vegetables in 2 tablespoons of oil for 10 to 15 minutes over medium heat, then add the water and herbs and bring to a boil, scraping up any dark bits from the bottom of the pan. Cook over medium heat for 45 minutes, uncovered, then strain, discarding the solids.

NOTE: If you want more fragrance and complexity in the stock, add any combination of fresh tomatoes, fennel, mushrooms, or other aromatic vegetables to the browning process, then cook and strain as above.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER ON CHICKEN STOCK

A Cook they hadde with hem for the nones,
To boille the chicknes with the mary-bones,
And poudre-marchant tart, and galingale.

—GEOFFREY CHAUCER, Prologue, II. 381-83, The Canterbury Tales, 1400

CHICKEN STOCK SWIMS THE ENGLISH CHANNEL

Ask Gertrude Ederle about the restorative powers of chicken stock. It was she, an American who in 1926 became the first woman to swim across the English Channel, who endured the fourteen-hour-and-thirty-one-minute swim by being fed chicken stock, seven separate times, while she floated on her back.

CHICKEN STOCK

Makes 8 cups

4 to 5 pounds chicken parts—backs, wings, necks, feet (with the nails clipped off)

2 medium onions, peeled and chopped

2 garlic cloves, crushed

1 carrot, trimmed and scrubbed

2 tablespoons fresh parsley

2 bay leaves

2 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon white peppercorns

12 cups (3 quarts) cold water

TO PREPARE

Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

1. Place all the ingredients in a large soup pot and pour in the water—the water should cover them by a minimum of 2 inches. Bring to a boil slowly over medium heat, then reduce the heat to low and simmer, covered, for 2 hours.

2. Remove the cover and simmer for at least another hour.

3. Strain the stock, discarding the solids. If you’re not going to use the stock immediately, cool it down quickly, uncovered, and then either refrigerate it or freeze it for later use, leaving the chicken fat on top to seal for freshness.

NOTE: For an entirely different “essence” of chicken, see the recipe for Chicken Soup with Ginger or Sesame Oil.

VEAL STOCK

Makes 8 cups

4 pounds veal knuckles, or 3 pounds veal knuckles and 1 pound boneless beef

16 cups (4 quarts) cold water

8 white peppercorns 1 bay leaf

1 teaspoon dried thyme

6 whole cloves

6 stems fresh parsley

1 medium onion, chopped

3 celery stalks with leaves, chopped

1 carrot, trimmed, scrubbed, and chopped

TO PREPARE

Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

1. In a large soup pot, bring all the ingredients to a boil over medium heat, then reduce the heat to low and simmer, uncovered, for 2½ to 3 hours, or until the stock is reduced by half.

2. Strain the stock, discarding the solids. If you’re not going to use the stock immediately, cool it down quickly, uncovered, and then either refrigerate it or freeze it for later use.

BEEF STOCK

Makes 8 cups

4 pounds beef bones, cracked by a butcher so the goodness of the marrow can be easily extracted

2 pounds beef soup bones

Any leftover beef or beef fat

12 cups (3 quarts) cold water

2 carrots, trimmed and scrubbed

4 medium onions, quartered

Handful of fresh parsley sprigs

1 parsnip, scrubbed and trimmed

2 garlic cloves, crushed

2 bay leaves

1½ teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon black peppercorns

TO PREPARE

Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

1. In a 450°F. oven, roast the bones and any meat in a large roasting pan for 1 hour. Put all the bones in a large soup pot, then pour 1 cup water into the roasting pan and scrape up any browned bits, then pour that liquid into the pot.

2. Add the remaining ingredients, then fill the pot with the remaining water, so it is at least 2 inches over the ingredients. Bring to a simmer slowly over medium heat, skimming as needed. Don’t let the stock come to a hard boil or it will cloud.

3. Cover and let simmer for 2 hours, then remove the cover and simmer for at least 2 more hours, skimming and adding water as needed.

4. Strain the stock, discarding the solids and rescuing any meat bits for another use. If you’re not going to use the stock immediately, cool it down quickly, uncovered, and then either refrigerate it or freeze it for later use, leaving the fat on top to seal the stock for freshness.

HUNGARIAN SMOKED MEAT STOCK

Makes 8 cups

THIS STOCK is a classic base for traditional Hungarian and other central European soups, and it is marvelous to use as a smoky, aromatic addition to any recipe for plain bean or pea soups.

10 ounces smoked ham shank or smoked ribs

8 cups (2 quarts) cold water

TO PREPARE

In advance of cooking: soak the smoked meat in cold water for at least 2 hours, changing the water several times to remove impurities.

TO COOK

1. Place the meat in a soup pot and cover with the cold water. Bring to a boil over medium heat, then reduce the heat to low and simmer for at least 30 minutes. Turn off the heat and let the meat cool in the stock.

2. Strain the stock, discarding the solids. If you’re not going to use the stock immediately, cool it down quickly, uncovered, and then either refrigerate it or freeze it for later use. Cut the meat off the bones for soup or another use, discarding the bones.

WHAT ON EARTH IS DASHI?

Like nothing else in the world, that’s what. It’s a heady combination of bonito (katsuobushi) fish and dried kelp, but not just fresh bonito and kelp, mind you. Oh, no: the bonito is caught, filleted, simmered, dry-smoked for some two weeks in fragrant wooden chambers, dried in the sun, and cured with mold for six weeks—at which point it looks just like chunks of wood and is ready to go.

Likewise, the kelp (or konbu, chock full of natural, non-headachy monosodium glutamate) is harvested from konbu boats with long forked poles, then spread out on shore to dry—first in the sun, then in drying chambers, at which point they are folded, bundled, and sent to market.

All the soup maker needs to do is shave pieces of the bonito block with a carpenter’s plane (honest! that, or buy it already shaved), wipe down the konbu, briefly simmer one after the other in the same water, voilá: perfect dashi, truly the fond de cuisine of Japanese kitchens.

JAPANESE SOUP STOCK

DASHI

Makes 8 cups

8-inch square of konbu (dried kelp), sponged clean and cut into a ½-inch fringe

10½ cups (2½ quarts) cold water

1 cup katsuobushi (dried bonito), flaked

TO PREPARE

Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

1. Place the kelp and cold water in a soup pot and bring just to a boil over medium heat. Remove the kelp (you can reserve it for one more stock-making session).

2. Return the broth to a boil over medium heat, stir in the bonito, and immediately remove from the heat. Let it sit for 2 to 3 minutes, then strain (also reserving the bonito for one more round) and use as needed. The stock will keep for a few days in the refrigerator.

TIP: Many Asian markets sell dashi stock granules (hon-dashi).

CONCENTRATED STOCKS

Stock is heavy, it spills, it spoils, it’s cumbersome to store, and it’s not easy to carry around if you’re on the road. Thus the evolution of today’s bouillon cubes and soup bases. But the history of concentrated stocks is ancient, “portable soup” being a mainstay of nomadic cultures nearly a thousand years earlier. A fourteenth-century Italian chronicler, in fact, described how, in medieval times, the Magyar warriors who swept into Europe on horseback from the Urals made their instant soup: they’d boil heavily salted beef in huge kettles until it fell off the bone, then cut it into small pieces, dry it in the sun or in an oven, grind it to a powder, and carry it in bags so that, on a campaign, all they had to do was boil up some water to make a proper soup. A recipe from the eighteenth century follows on the next page.

THE HISTORY OF CONCENTRATED STOCK

It’s downright romantic. Count Rumford (1753–1814), an American-born physicist, inventor, and all-around dashing character, is credited with popularizing “portable soup” while in the service of the Duke of Bavaria. Using the highest technology of the time, he mass-produced a fully nutritious, solidified stock of bones, inexpensive meat byproducts, and other ingredients; fed the Duke’s army with it; then transferred his findings to the private sector—effectively inventing the concept of municipal soup kitchens. The sensation this concentrate caused is captured in the 1773 journals of Scotsman James Boswell, best known as literary groupie to Samuel Johnson: “A page of my Journal is like a cake of portable soup. A little may be diffused into a considerable portion.”

—Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, September 13, 1773

“PORTABLE” SOUP

To make a Veal Glue, or Cake Soup to be carried in the Pocket, take a Leg of Veal, strip it of the Skin and the Fat, then take all the muscular or fleshy Parts from the Bones; boil this Flesh gently in such a Quantity of Water, and so long a Time, till the Liquor will make a strong Jelly when it is cold: This you may try by taking out a small Spoonful now and then, and letting it cool.

Here it is to be supposed, that though it will jelly presently in small Quantities, yet all the Juice of the Meat may not be extracted; however, when you find it very strong, strain the Liquor through a Sieve, and let it settle; then provide a large Stew-pan, with Water, and some China Cups, or glazed Earthenware; fill these Cups with Jelly taken clear from the Settling, and set them in a Stew-pan of Water, and let the Water boil gently till the Jelly becomes as thick as Glue; after which, let them stand to cool, and then turn out the Glue upon a piece of new Flannel, which will draw out the Moisture; turn them once in six or eight Hours, and put them upon a fresh Flannel, and so continue to do till they are quite dry, and keep it in a dry warm Place: This will harden so much, that it will be stiff and hard as Glue in a little Time, and may be carried in the Pocket without Inconvenience.

You are to use this by boiling about a Pint of Water, and pouring it upon a Piece of the Glue or Cake, about the Bigness of a small walnut, and stirring it with a Spoon till the cake dissolves, which will make a very strong good Broth. As for the seasoning part, every one may add Pepper and Salt as they like it, for there must be nothing of that Kind put among the Veal when you make the Glue, for any Thing of that sort would make it moldy…. So may a Dish of good Soup be made without Trouble, only allowing the Proportion of Cake Gravy answering to the abovelaid Direction: Or if Gravy be wanted for Sauce, double the Quantity may be used that is prescribed for Broth or Soup.

—The Lady’s Companion, 1753

CLARIFYING STOCK

Nothing is more elegant than a crystal-clear hot broth or cold jellied stock that shows off the design of an exquisite porcelain bowl, such as the jellied consommé recipe. Clarified stock, in fact, is the very soul of soups served in classic French cuisine—and it is easy to accomplish, if time-consuming.

Homemade stock at room temperature (if your stock is hot, cool it down with ice cubes)

1 egg white, slightly beaten, and 1 crumpled eggshell per 4 cups of stock

TO PREPARE

Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

1. Pour the stock into a large soup pot and stir in the egg whites and eggshells. Put the pot over very low heat and very slowly, without stirring, bring the mixture just to a simmer. As the sediments coagulate with the egg whites, a thick scum will rise to the surface of the liquid. Don’t succumb to the temptation of skimming the pot. Just push the scum aside so you can keep an eye on the simmer of the stock—anything close to a boil will disturb the clarifying process.

2. Simmer for 10 to 15 minutes, then carefully remove the pot from the heat and let stand for anywhere from 10 minutes to 1 hour.

3. When you are ready to collect the stock, just push the scum aside and ladle the stock through a sieve lined with several layers of cheesecloth that have been dipped in hot water and wrung out.

4. If you’re not going to use the stock immediately, cool it down quickly, uncovered, and then either refrigerate it or freeze it for later use.

ENRICO CARUSO SINGS FOR HIS SOUP

In a newspaper interview, the world-famous operatic tenor Enrico Caruso recounted the following story about his life at age twenty-one in 1894: “I went into the artillery and my major wanted to know who was that fellow who was singing all the time…. One great day he took me to a friend, a wealthy amateur musician, who listened to me and taught me the tenor roles in Cavalleria Rusticana and Carmen. One day I did not sing at all. The major sent for me. ‘Why did you not sing today, Caruso?’ ‘I cannot sing on greasy soup.’ Next day, my soup was strong and there was no grease on it.”

SOUP TALES FROM VERSAILLES

The French king Louis XIV, the Sun King, was known to eat four bowls of clear soup with both lunch and dinner, commissioning his chefs to create a consommé so clear it would reflect his royal image. Alas, some seventy years after his death, this same clear consommé was the last thing his grand-daughter-in-law Marie Antoinette could choke down before she was led to her destiny with Monsieur le Guillotine on October 16, 1793.

PART II

“THE MEANING OF SOUP”

The meaning of soup has been lost.
Life moves slowly, with a warm, oozing tread,
It smells like river mud, like cows and slow earth.
The woman under a man knows that smell.

An odor as nourishing as good soup,
A nutritious weeping, a few patient days
(Here is where we eat, drink, breathe, and make love.)

Must I explain? Is there anyone who doesn’t know this?
Life is a heavy humus, sweet and black.
It has the heat of the loins and insists on shedding tears.

It is the dammed up river of the woman we love,
The ripe fruit of exhausted hours,
And a job, a house, an impulse, a routine.

Because all of us live and life is just like that.
It is not love, or happiness, or ideas, or the future.
It is just a hot, thick, dirty soup.

—GABRIEL CELAYA, twentieth-century Spanish poet

5
TO CELEBRATE AND RECOVER FROM GIVING BIRTH

How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?

—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, twentieth-century Irish poet,
from “A Prayer for My Daughter,” 1919

ONCE UPON A TIME, a baby is born. Any baby. Hallelujah! No matter how dire the time or circumstances, it’s inevitably a time of joy… and also a time of ritually sustaining mother and child with gentle foods, to bring them into health and strength.

Bid a strong ghost stand at the head
That my Michael may sleep sound,
Nor cry, nor turn in the bed
’Till his morning meal come round;
And may departing twilight keep
All dread afar till morning’s back,
That his mother may not lack
Her fill of sleep.

—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS,
“A Prayer for My Son,” 1928

In times past, of course, “prenatal care” and postpartum nutrition were largely in the hands of women—family members, maids, and midwives. Moms-to-be “ate for two” when food was plenty, and made do when it wasn’t, but customarily they got preferential treatment in expectation of the value a healthy baby would eventually bring to the family.

Most soups for new mothers are meant to be served the first weeks after delivery—the critical time when these women need to regain their strength and produce rich breast milk … and lots of it.

Not surprisingly, these soups look a lot like traditional soups for the sick and convalescent: lots of meat, lots of digestible things, soft and bland but packed with protein. It is good advice to this day to feed new mothers this way, like so much folk wisdom and so many traditions that have stood the test of millennia.

The recipes that follow, with the exception of Gee tong, are offered in small “at home” portions, meant to be prepared quickly and served immediately, though they could easily be doubled to serve family members and guests. Gee tong, of course, is specifically designed to be reheated for the new mom and to last a week.

RIDDLE ME THIS

QUESTION: “What is it that a mother loves dearly, but that won’t look at her and won’t talk to her?”

QUESTION: What am I?

“Unseasoned, uncooked, and served up at no table. Yet emperors, kings, and princesses all eat this food.”

CHINA
CHICKEN SOUP WITH GINGER OR SESAME OIL

GEE TONG

Serves a new mother for 1 week, or 6 to 8

SINCE ANCIENT TIMES until today—and no matter in what province of China—a daily dose of chicken soup for one month is prescribed for new mothers. Why chicken soup? Because it is yang—and new mothers, like the chronically fatigued, need to be warmed up, bucked up, and have their blood loss replenished. In eastern provinces, this soup is flavored with ginger; in southern provinces, it’s given a shot of sesame oil. It is prepared by the “double boiling method,” which makes the soup a kind of essence. It doesn’t at all taste—or look—like “regular” chicken stock, that’s for sure. This is truly the champagne of chicken elixirs: pale gold in color, pure in taste.

1 whole chicken, 3 to 3½ pounds, or 4 pounds chicken backs and wings, fat removed, washed in cold water, drained, and cut through the bones into about 12 pieces

½ pound chicken feet, nails removed

8 cups (2 quarts) boiling water

3 cups sliced green onions, green parts only (in 2-inch lengths)

6 whole peppercorns

10 slices fresh ginger, the size of a quarter, smashed with the flat side of a knife, or 2 teaspoons toasted sesame oil, plus more to taste

1 teaspoon salt, or to taste

TO PREPARE

1. In a large soup pot, bring at least 8 cups of water to a rolling boil. Drop in the chicken pieces and blanch them for 1 minute after the water returns to a boil. Drain the chicken, discarding the water, then rinse the chicken in cold water and drain again.

2. Prep the remaining ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

1. Heat the oven to 425°F. Bring a large kettle of water to a boil.

2. Place the chicken pieces and feet, 8 cups of boiling water, green onions, peppercorns, and either the ginger pieces or sesame oil in a Dutch oven. Seal the top with heavy-duty aluminum foil, then cover with a heavy lid.

3. Place the pot into a deep baking pan, then fill the baking pan with enough boiling water to reach about 2 inches up the side of the Dutch oven.

4. Bake for 2 to 3 hours, adding boiling water to the baking pan as necessary to keep the oven filled with steam.

5. Remove the Dutch oven from the water bath, unseal it, and skim the top of the broth to remove any impurities and fat. Strain the soup through a colander, then through a sieve that has been lined with moistened cheesecloth. Reserve any meaty chicken pieces. Stir the salt into the broth.

TO SERVE

Ladle the soup into a serving bowl. At this point, if you are making the southern variation, you can whisk in a few more drops of sesame oil, if your new mother likes it. Then add a piece of the chicken meat and serve. For the rest of the week, reheat the broth and chicken pieces in a sealed pot in a 375°F. oven for 10 to 15 minutes, or until piping hot—this will keep the broth clear.

THE ONE-MONTH CHICKEN-SOUP ANNIVERSARY

According to Chinese tradition, once a baby reaches one month of age, baby and mother are deemed “recovered” from the birthing process and they are presented to the world. Guests bring a red egg for baby, to symbolize good luck, and ginger (yang) for mom, to keep warding off evil spirits and balancing her yin. And what are party guests served for refreshments? A potent “whiskey” soup, bursting with rare ingredients—and chicken.

LI PO CELEBRATES CHILDREN AND CHICKEN SOUP

Here in the mountains in autumn-tide

Of new-brewed wine and yellow chick fattened on grain,

I call the boy to boil the fowl and pour the white wine,

While my children, playing noisily about, tug me by the sleeve.

I sing and imbibe the bland ecstasy of the cup;

I rise and dance in the tangled beams of the setting sun.

—LI PO, eighth-century T’ang dynasty poet and Taoist bon vivant

FRANCE
“BOILED WATER” GARLIC SOUP

PROVENÇAL L’AÏGO BOULIDO

Serves 4

REPUTEDLY A FRENCH elixir for convalescents and birthing mothers—and a godsend for those with hangovers—this delicate soup is almost unexplainably comforting. It’s very soft, and the fragrances of the herbed broth and fruity olive oil help the tender bread sop and cheese slip right down to comfort a tight stomach. It’s also traditionally part of Le gros souper, the meatless meal in Provence taken on Christmas eve before Midnight Mass.

Thin slices of day-old French bread, 1 to 3 per person, depending on size (they should fill the bottom surface of the soup plate you are using)

4 tablespoons olive oil

4 cups (1 quart) water

Salt to taste

24 garlic cloves, sliced lengthwise (tradition says to remove any green sprouts from the garlic centers, but I don’t think it’s worth the trouble. Today’s green sprouts aren’t bitter as they were in days past)

2 bay leaves

1 sprig sage (if you use dried sage, tie 1 teaspoon of it in a cheesecloth bag so you can easily remove it from the broth)

Grated Gruyère cheese, for garnish

TO PREPARE

1. Brush the bread slices with olive oil and toast in a 350°F. oven until dry, about 10 minutes. Set aside.

2. Prep the remaining ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

1. In a large saucepan, combine the water, salt, garlic, bay leaves, and sage. Bring to a boil over high heat, reduce the heat to medium low, cover, and cook for 20 minutes or until the garlic is very soft.

2. Remove the bay leaves and sage sprig, and puree the soup in a blender. Pour it back into the pan, cover, and let steep until you are ready to serve it, at least 10 minutes.

TO SERVE

Heat your soup plates in the oven for a few minutes, then layer their bottoms with the toasted bread slices. Sprinkle the toast with the cheese, then with any remaining olive oil. Reheat the soup to a boil, ladle it over the toast, and serve immediately.

“THE YOUNG MOTHER”

The young mother, in the cheeks of the little child she is holding, breathes in her own purest substance. She presses him to her so that he shall remain always herself. She embraces the being she has made. She forgets and rejoices at having given herself, since she has retrieved and found herself again in the tender contact of the intoxicating freshness of his flesh. And vainly those beautiful hands squeeze the fruit she has formed, she feels herself pure, through and through, and like a virgin fulfilled….

She is not sure whether the center of the universe is in her heart or in this little heart that is beating in her arms and that, in its turn, brings all things to life.

—PAUL VALERY, twentieth-century French poet-philosopher

HEADY GARLIC

The English poet Thomas Nash, in The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), describes garlic as making “a man winke, drinke and stinke.” Alexander Dumas pere, in his Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, remarks, “Everybody knows the odor garlic except the one who has eaten it and wonders why everybody turns away from him.” These truisms have been updated in a New York City saying that goes: “A nickel will get you on the subway, but garlic will get you a seat.”

JAPAN
CABBAGE AND CLAM MISO SOUP

KYABETSU TO ASARI NO MISOSHIRU

Serves 4

REPUTED TO PRODUCE good breast milk after the birth of a child, this soup is both hearty and delicate, with many layers of flavor delivered in every spoonful. It can be served at any meal. Shirumono— a classic thick miso soup—is a traditional breakfast food in Japan served with rice and salted pickles; it is also served with three-dish meals at lunch and dinner, often ending the meal with rice and salt pickled vegetables. This recipe was generously given to me by Yukari Odegawa, my dear friend in Kamioka who introduced me to the pleasures of both Japanese food and Kabuki theater. The soup is fragrant and tasty, the earthiness of miso setting off the sea saltiness of the clams and the fiber of the greens. It’s so pleasant to eat with chopsticks, bit by bit, then drink the broth directly from the bowl.

4 cups Japanese Soup Stock (dashi)

4 Napa cabbage leaves, or hakusai, stems removed, leaves cut into 1-inch pieces

3 tablespoons red (aka) miso

8 small hard-shell clams (ideally, asari clams), removed from their shells and washed in salty water (leave them in the water until you’re ready to cook them)

TO PREPARE

1. Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list. Make the dashi broth as explained or dilute hon-dashi stock granules in 4 cups broth.

2. Heat the serving bowls, in the oven if they are porcelain, or by filling them with hot water if they’re lacquer.

TO COOK

1. In a large saucepan, heat the dashi over medium heat to a slow boil. Stir in the cabbage and cook, covered, for 5 minutes.

2. Pour about ½ cup of the hot liquid into a small bowl and whisk the miso into it to soften.

3. Add the clams to the hot soup and let cook a minute, uncovered. Strain the miso mixture into the pan and take the pan off the heat immediately.

TO SERVE

Ladle the soup into the heated bowls, placing two clams in each, and serve immediately. It’s nice to have lids for the bowls so your new mother can be delighted by both the beauty of the presentation and the fragrance of the soup when she uncovers the bowl.

GAZING INTO THE HEART OF MISO SOUP

I was once invited to a tea ceremony where miso was served. And when I saw the muddy, claylike color, quiet in a black lacquer bowl beneath the faint light of a candle, this soup that I usually take without a second thought seemed somehow to acquire a real depth, and to become infinitely more appetizing as well.

—JUNICHIRO TANIZAKI, twentieth-century Japanese novelist

WHAT ON EARTH IS MISO?

Miso is a fermented soybean paste that actually comes in different varieties, each with its own aroma and flavor, color, and texture. But all types of miso are made the same way: by smashing boiled soybeans and letting them ferment in cedar vats with either wheat, barley, or rice that has been cultured with yeast mold. The miso “matures” for months—even up to three years. Red miso is made with barley and is savory and good for winter soups. Rice-mold misos (shiromiso) are yellow and white, relatively light and sweet. The third type of miso is made with bean koji and is dark and thick. Miso can last up to a year, refrigerated.

Miso soups evolved in the twelfth century when, with the rise of the powerful Shogun in Kamakura, epicurean Buddhist monks lost their powerful Imperial protectors in Kyoto and forsook their fancy ways. New “common man” Buddhist sects, led by Honen and Nichiren, preached the virtues of a simple diet and discouraged harming any living thing, including fish. These monks encouraged people to eat simple vegetable meals: rice (or barley/millet), salt-pickled vegetables, and miso soup, the last made with a seaweed-only broth.

KOREA
CLEAR SEAWEED SOUP

MALGUN MIYOK KUK

Serves 4, or 1 mom in the course of a day

THIS NUTRITIOUS SOUP is prescribed for a new mother three or four times a day for twenty-one straight days! It can be simple—a beef and kelp soup seasoned lightly with garlic, soy sauce, and green onion—or it can be rich and complex, made with chicken stock, chicken, tofu, and sesame oil, as more of a celebration dish that can also traditionally commemorate a child’s birthday. Malgun miyok kuk is a pretty soup—thick with beef and meaty seaweed, fragrant with sesame and oil, all in a light but rich-tasting broth.

1 ounce dried brown miyok (wakame) seaweed

½ pound boneless beef shoulder or flank steak, thinly sliced, then cut into thick strips 2 inches long

2 garlic cloves, minced

2 tablespoons soy sauce

1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil

1 teaspoon peanut oil

1 green onions, cut lengthwise, then into 2-inch lengths, including white and some green

4 cups (1 quart) water

Cooked white rice (optional)

1 green onion, minced, for garnish

TIP: partially frozen meat is very easy to slice.

TO PREPARE

1. Soak the seaweed in warm water for 30 minutes.

2. Prep the remaining ingredients as directed in the recipe list, to include making the rice if you plan to serve it.

3. Mix the beef strips with the garlic, soy sauce, and sesame oil and let marinate until the seaweed is ready to be cooked.

4. When the seaweed has rehydrated, scrub it under running water, rinse, drain, lay it flat, and use scissors to cut it into 2-inch squares, discarding the hard center stalks.

TO COOK

In a large saucepan, heat the peanut oil over high heat, then fry the beef mixture and green onions for a minute, letting the beef brown on all sides. Stir in the drained seaweed pieces, followed by the water, and bring to a boil over high heat (it will foam a bit). Reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer for 30 minutes.

TO SERVE

Ladle the soup into the new mother’s bowl and sprinkle with minced green onion. The soup can be reheated for subsequent servings during the day or, if you are serving it to others, ladled evenly among four bowls, sprinkled with minced green onion, and served with white rice on the side.

THE SAMSHINSANG

In ancient times, after first bathing a newborn, a new Korean mother would make a samshinsang—an altar for the three divine Shaman beings—in a corner of her room, close to her head, and make offerings of white rice and malgun miyok kuk on it. This showed respect and gratitude to the three gods who so strongly influenced fertility in the family, not to mention the health of the fetus from conception to birth.

PROVERBIALLY NOT IN THE SCHEME OF THINGS

When Koreans talk about doing something impossible, they say, “Ask a woman to give birth to a child she has not conceived.”

MARVELOUS MIYOK

Miyok is considered to act as a powerful blood cleanser and bone strengthener. This seaweed is abundant off all sides of Korea’s peninsula, and so has always been available even to the poorest families. When my Korean grocer helped me sort through his aisle-long display of seaweeds to find it, he couldn’t disguise his curiosity. “You know how to make it?” he asked me with an amused look. “Tell me,” I said. “Wash it,” he said. “Cut it and put it to soak. Get good beef. Not pork, only beef! Cook with sesame and garlic. I don’t know if you’ll like!” “Do you like it?” I asked. He blew his lips impatiently: “Of course,” he said. “All Koreans like it.”

PUERTO RICO
SPICED CHICKEN NOODLE SOUP

SOPA DE FIDEOS Y POLLO

Serves 4

THIS SOPA is comforting to look at—a study of creams and whites, nothing jarring—thick and rich, intensely chicken, and so nicely tasty that you just want to follow one spoonful with the next one until the whole bowl is gone. Not only is the dish used to strengthen new mothers and heal the sick, it is also one of the first solid foods given to Puerto Rican babies.

1 pound boneless raw chicken, cut into bite-size pieces

Adobo seasoning to taste

4 cups (1 quart) Chicken Stock

¼ cup recaíto

2 tablespoons short-grain white rice

1¼ cups peeled and diced potatoes

1 cup angel hair pasta broken into short lengths

2 sprigs fresh cilantro

Salt and white pepper to taste

TO PREPARE

1. Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list, and make the adobo and recaíto, if necessary.

2. Sprinkle the adobo on the chicken and let marinate for a few minutes.

TO COOK

1. Bring the stock, recaíto, and seasoned chicken bits slowly to a boil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Stir in the rice, potatoes, pasta, and cilantro sprigs, and bring back to a boil, then reduce the heat to low, cover, and let simmer until the rice is tender, about 20 minutes.

2. Remove the cilantro sprigs, and season with the salt and white pepper.

TO SERVE

Ladle the soup into bowls and serve immediately.

PUERTO RICAN SOUP TRADITIONS

Puerto Rico was discovered by Christopher Columbus on his second voyage to the New World. It’s no surprise, then, that its cuisine is a combination of cocina criolla—native cookery—plus all the influences brought from the Old World by African slaves, Europeans, and even Chinese (who were shipped in as plantation labor after slavery was abolished). Soup was often the main meal in slave or indentured-servant days, as workers would pool all their available food bits in the morning in one caldero and cook them over a coal fire until lunch break, at which point they’d sit down and serve it out. Soup is commonly served as the first course of dinner in Puerto Rico, followed by rice, beans, and a meat dish.

CAN’T FIND PUERTO RICAN SEASONINGS AT YOUR LOCAL GROCERY? THEY’RE EASY TO MAKE.

ADOBO: mix 1 tablespoon garlic powder, 1 tablespoon onion powder, 1 tablespoon oregano powder, and ½ tablespoon each salt and white pepper. Makes ¼ cup.

RECAÍTO: puree in a blender ¼ diced onion, 1 garlic clove, ½ small sweet green pepper, 1 tablespoon chopped cilantro, and 2 recao leaves (or substitute 1 more tablespoon fresh cilantro as this herb is like cilantro but stronger in flavor). Makes ½ cup.

6
TO CELEBRATE RELIGIOUS CONFIRMATION

ONCE UPON A TIME, feasts were traditionally served by families to celebrate a child’s confirmation of baptism and entry into the life of the church—and such celebrations often included soup. In today’s hectic world, alas, these elaborate feasts have largely gone by the wayside. Klarsuppe, however, remains an exception. And no wonder. This Danish meatball and dumpling soup is a honey: very tasty, very pretty, and with a great contrast of textures, taking advantage of the sweet baby vegetables of spring, the time when thirteen-year-olds are traditionally welcomed into the Danish church.

The recipe on the following page, adapted from Beatrice Ojakangas’s Scandinavian Feasts, is designed to feed a small party, but it can easily be doubled or halved to accommodate your guest list.

DENMARK
MEATBALL AND DUMPLING SOUP

KLARSUPPE

Serves 8

IMAGINE A SOUP plate brimming with a pure, clear beef broth, then mentally fill it with buttery dumplings and tiny meatballs, accented by bits of carrots and sweet baby peas. It may look complicated to make, but in fact it isn’t. You just need to make the dumplings and meatballs a bit in advance, then it’s a snap to assemble at the last minute … like, if you’re rushing in from church after witnessing the confirmation of your thirteen-year-old daughter.

FOR THE MEATBALLS

½ pound pork filet, trimmed of fat and partially frozen for easy grinding (other meats are also fine)

½ cup finely chopped onion

1 teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon pepper

¼ teaspoon ground allspice

3 tablespoons all-purpose flour

3 tablespoons milk

1 egg white, lightly beaten (save the yolk for the dumplings)

FOR THE DUMPLINGS

½ cup (1 stick) butter

1 cup water

1 teaspoon salt

1 cup all-purpose flour

2 eggs plus the leftover egg yolk

FOR THE SOUP

8 cups (2 quarts) Beef Stock

½ cup peeled and diced carrots (about the size of the baby peas)

½ cup baby peas

Chopped fresh chervil (or tarragon or parsley), for garnish

TO PREPARE

   FOR THE MEATBALLS

1. Grind the meat in a food processor until finely cut (you can also ask your butcher to grind the meat, or you can cut it by hand). Put it into a bowl, stir in the onion, and season with salt, pepper, and allspice.

2. In a small cup, beat the flour and milk together, then stir into the meat. Finally, mix in the egg white. Let sit for at least 30 minutes.

3. When you are ready to cook the meatballs, bring 2 inches of water to a boil in a large, wide pot over medium-high heat. Season liberally with salt.

4. With a teaspoon, shape and drop 40 small meatballs into the boiling water and let cook for 4 to 5 minutes. Strain with a perforated spoon, let drain in a sieve until dry, then store in the refrigerator until needed.

   FOR THE DUMPLINGS

1. In a small saucepan, bring the butter, water, and salt to a boil over medium-high heat. Pour in the flour all at once and stir hard with a wooden spoon, until the mass is smooth and forms a ball that peels off the sides of the pot. Remove from the heat and let cool for 10 minutes.

2. Bring 2 inches of water in a large, wide pot to a boil over medium-high heat and season well with salt.

3. After the dumpling dough has cooled, beat in the eggs and egg yolk, one at a time, until the dough is satiny.

4. When the water is at a medium boil, use two small spoons to make and drop 40 dumplings into the water.

5. When you have finished dropping the dumplings into the water and the water again begins to boil, pour about ¼ cup of cold water into the pot to stop the boiling. When it comes to a strong boil again, pour in another bit of cold water. And, again, for the third time, pour in cold water when it returns to strong boil. At this point, the dumplings should be firm and completely cooked. Lift them out of the water with a perforated spoon and let them drain in a sieve. When they are completely drained, you may store them in the refrigerator until needed.

6. When you are ready to finalize the soup, take the dumplings and meatballs out of the refrigerator and put them in a warm spot. They should be room temperature when you are ready to assemble the soup.

TO COOK

Bring the stock to a boil over medium-high heat in a large soup pot and stir in the carrots. Cook for 5 minutes, then add the baby peas. Cook for 5 more minutes.

TO SERVE

Set out the soup bowls and arrange five meatballs and five dumplings in each. When the soup is ready, ladle some into each of the bowls and top with chopped chervil. Serve immediately.

FRETTY CHERVIL

Originally a native of western Asia, chervil was first cultivated in Syria, according to Pliny the Elder, where its roots and leaves were eaten raw and also cooked as a vegetable. It got its name in Greece, from chaerophyllon, “herb of rejoicing.” And it was spread far and wide by the Romans, who planted it near all their many camps throughout the Roman Empire to use as a flavoring herb. John Parkinson says about it in his 1629 Paradisus: “Sweet Chervil or Sweet Cis is so like in taste unto Anis seede that it much delighteth the taste among other herbs in a sallet.” The English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, in frustration with God, begs Him to water his roots the way He lavishes water on “fretty chervil.”

7
TO CELEBRATE MARRIAGE … AND RECOVER FROM THE RIGORS OF THE HONEYMOON

ONCE UPON A TIME, there were no June brides, nor May ones either, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. Why? Because in agrarian societies there was work to be done then, planting and cultivating the fields. Back in ancient Roman times, Ovid noted, “Mense malum Maio nubvero vulgus ait,” or, “Common folk say ’tis ill to wed in May.” Then, again, in medieval times, it was thought that “they that wive between sickle and scythe, shall never thrive.”

Weddings back then were for fall and winter, after the harvest was in—which is likely why hot wedding soups became traditional fare in many cultures. Baby, it was cold outside … and dark. Granaries were full; animals were back in the barn. Bachelors and maids alike turned their thoughts toward domestic comforts. In China, marriage was thought best at the first new moon of the year. In ancient Greece and Italy, it was winter or late autumn. In Japan, the best times were the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth lunar months. In England and Germany, it was at the harvest moon, and in Scotland and Ireland, “Marry when the year is new,/Always loving, always true.”

These old customs are hardly remembered in today’s age of industrialized agriculture and global agritrade. June weddings now seem more natural, often following school graduations and signaling the beginning of the work life. But traditional wedding soups continue to be brought steaming to the table, no matter what the temperature outside.

The recipes that follow are offered in portions for six to eight people, to suit a small wedding party. They can, however, be doubled—or halved—as appropriate.

RIDDLE ME THIS

QUESTION: What fastens two people together but touches only one?

CHINA
RED BEAN AND LOTUS SEED SOUP

HUNG DAU LIN JEE TONG

Serves 6 to 8

THIS SWEET SOUP sends the bride and groom off to a sweet life—with the lotus seeds standing for the many babies the marriage will produce. The custom was perhaps most memorably enacted in Chinese film director Ang Lee’s charming and hilarious movie Hsi Yen, or The Wedding Banquet, where dutiful son Wai-Tung Gao, anxious to conceal his long-term relationship with Andrew from his parents, arranges a marriage of convenience in New York City with one of his female tenants, adorable Wei-Wei, who needs a green card. Mom and Dad arrive in ecstasy from Taiwan for the wedding and a two-week stay. Wai-Tung and Wei-Wei’s modest marriage plans almost immediately go stratospheric, ending in a completely over-the-top wedding and banquet.

8 cups (2 quarts) cold water

14-ounce package small red beans, washed to remove grit and drained

1½-ounce package lotus seeds, washed and drained

1 piece dried tangerine skin, soaked in hot water 10 minutes until soft

¾ cup brown sugar

TO PREPARE

Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

1. In a large pot, combine the water, red beans, lotus seeds, and tangerine skin. Bring to a boil over high heat, then reduce the heat to low and simmer, partially covered, for about 1½ hours, or until the beans are tender (when you blow on them, the skins will burst).

2. Stir in the brown sugar and let simmer for another minute to let the flavors blend.

TO SERVE

Remove the tangerine skin, then pour the soup into a heated tureen and bring to the table, to be ladled into exquisite little cups.

THE SOUP RITUAL IN ANG LEE’S HSI YEN

MRS. GAU: “Sister Mao, please get the lotus soup.”

[Wai-Tung and Wei-Wei bow three times to the parents and are handed an envelope.]

WAI-TUNG: “Thank you, Ma.”

WEI-WEI: “Thank you.”

MRS. GAO: “We’re turning Wai-Tung over to you.”

MR. GAO: “And you, Wai-Tung, must care well for Wei-Wei.”

WAI-TUNG: “I will.”

MR. GAO: “Here’s a soup for a quick first son.”

WAI-TUNG: “Wei-Wei, kneel for the soup.”

MRS. GAO: “Have some lotus soup; a son will come quickly.”

WEI-WEI: “Come on, Wai-Tung, kneel down and have some soup with me.”

WAI-TUNG: “Having a son is a female thing.”

MRS. GAO: “She can’t give birth without your help, right?”

[Mrs. Gao feeds Wei-Wei the soup, blowing on each spoonful. Wei-Wei bursts into tears and is led out of the room.]

It’s a miracle: by the end of the movie, Wei-Wei has conceived and Wai-Tung and Andrew can’t wait to become the proud fathers. It’s precisely what wedding soup is all about.

“LADY NIGHT SONG OF Autumn”

She opens her window
To the autumn moon’s light.
She puts out the candle
And slips off her silken shirt.

Softly she smiles
Within the curtains of her bed.
She raises her body—
An orchid fragrance spreads.

—ANONYMOUS, from China’s Six Dynasties Period, A.D. 300–600

FRANCE
BRETON WEDDING SOUP

SOUPE DE MARIAGE BRETAGNE

MAXIM ME THIS

There are successful marriages, but no blissful ones.

—FRANÇOIS DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, seventeenth-century French writer and moralist, MAXIM 113

RIDDLE ME THIS

QUESTION: What turns without moving?

Serves 6 to 8

I FOUND THE inspiration for this recipe in the town of Guimiliau—actually for sale as a book about Breton cooking, in the Ossuary, or former bone house, of Guimiliau’s parish close. Maybe it’s a sad statement about the preemption of old holy places for tourism, yet a think piece, too. Recipe books served up in the place where food and life end physically suggests that the bone house still has the power to feed the spiritual life of the village. And the milk soup? Delicious—sweet and garlicky.

6 to 8 slices stale bread

3 tablespoons butter

4 large onions, very thinly sliced

2 garlic cloves, very thinly sliced

10 cups milk

Salt to taste (preferably sel de mer, with its tang of the sea) White pepper to taste

TO PREPARE

Toast the bread in a 350°F. oven for 10 to 15 minutes, until dry and crisp. Prep the remaining ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

1. Melt the butter in a large soup pot and brown it over medium heat. Add the onions and cook until they are browned. Add the garlic and stir until well browned.

2. Pour in the milk, salt, and pepper. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, then reduce the heat to low and simmer, uncovered, until the onions are tender, 10 to 15 minutes.

TO SERVE

Arrange the toasted bread in six or eight bowls, depending on the number of guests, and ladle the soup into each, serving immediately.

NOTE: Ironically, soupe au lait, or “milk soup,” is an expression in France for someone who is short-tempered and boils over easily. Uh, oh.

BRETON MARRIAGE CUSTOMS

According to Pierre-Jakez Helias, in The Horse of Pride: Life in a Breton Village, “Custom still required that the newlyweds not be left to themselves until the evening of the third day. The first night was dedicated to the Virgin; the second, to Saint Joseph. And then came the ‘milk soup’ ceremony, which was both symbolic and rather spicy. The recipe for that soup varied from one region to another and depended on the young people’s imaginations, but it always included a string of garlic cloves. The milk in the soup proclaimed that the couple’s life together would be pleasant; the garlic warned them to expect many disappointments. The younger guests would generally bring it to husband and wife at the banquet table, heartily singing the song of their ancestors—a sad ballad that was meant to make any bride of good stock weep with one eye and laugh with the other. Then the bom-bardists and bagpipers would strike up another milk-soup tune that was livelier and well known for its tendency to ‘dry away the tears,’ prompting all the people at the tables to loudly rejoice.”

FRANCE
BRETON HONEYMOON SOUP

SOUPE À L’OIGNON “JOHNNY”

BRETON “JOHNNIES”

This honeymoon soup is also called “la soupe de Johnny,” dating from the nineteenth century, when Breton onion sellers, or Johnnies, braved the rough waters of the English Channel to sell their wares from door to door in England. They could be spotted from a distance throughout England and into Scotland, wearing black berets and riding bicycles slung with strings of fat onions from the fertile Breton fields that are still producing delicious onions today.

Serves 6 to 8

HERE IS A superb soup that goes to the heart of robust country humor. No sooner do the Breton bride and groom drink their sobering wedding soup than they are escorted by well-wishers straight to the bedroom. Leaving the couple some privacy, the well-wishers return to the kitchen and prepare this soup. Once it is ready—and it takes only about an hour to make—these “friends” carry it back to the bedroom and burst in on the couple, singing, “L’apportons-nous la soupe, la soupe? L’apportons-nous la soupe à l’oignon?” or “May we bring the soup, the soup? May we bring the onion soup?”

8 cups (2 quarts) water

Salt to taste

1½ pounds big onions (about 4), quartered

2 medium potatoes, peeled and quartered

2 tablespoons tapioca

1 egg yolk

½ cup heavy cream

2 tablespoons butter

TO PREPARE

Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

1. Bring the water to a boil in a large soup pot over high heat, then add the salt, onions, and potatoes. When the water returns to a boil, reduce the heat to low and simmer, partially covered, for 30 minutes. Sprinkle in the tapioca and boil gently, uncovered, for 10 more minutes.

2. Puree the soup, solids first, and return to the pot. Taste for seasoning.

3. To finish the soup, whisk the egg yolk into the cream, lighten with ½ cup of the hot pureed soup, then stir into the pot and simmer for a few minutes to thicken.

TO SERVE

Stir the butter into the soup as an enrichment, then ladle the soup into bowls and carry it to the lucky couple … and serve the rest to the other members of the party.

RIDDLE ME THIS

QUESTION: What am I? I’m a strange creature, for I satisfy women, a service to the neighbors! No one suffers at my hands except for my slayer. I grow very tall, erect in a bed. I’m hairy underneath. From time to time a beautiful girl, the brave daughter of some churl, dares to hold me, grips my russet skin, robs me of my head and puts me in the pantry. At once that girl with plaited hair who has confined me remembers our meeting. Her eye moistens.

Mercy! Can’t guess? Here’s another one with the same answer:

QUESTION: Quick; quite mum; I die notwithstanding. I lived once, I live again. Everybody lifts me, grips me, and chops off my head, bites my bare body, violates me. I never bite a man unless he bites me; there are many men who bite me.

Puzzled? These are riddles #25 and #65 from the Old English Exeter Book, made public by Leofric, first Bishop of Exeter in 1072.

GUATEMALA
LAMB SOUP WITH TAMALES

CALDO DE CARNERO

“GIVE YOURSELF WHOLLY”

Fly kites with your children, cultivate your philosophies; give women your tenderness and men your energy.

And at every moment valiant, sincere, at every moment of all your days, give yourself wholly!

Say, “I shape always with equal care my clay or my gold.”

And at midday when the sun burns highest, like a good workman—like a good workman!
And at evenfall play with your children, feel yourself lightened; and at night’s coming, sleep wholly.

Give yourself wholly until you fall motionless in the final moment; and when death comes, give yourself wholly!

—RAFAEL AREVALO MARTINEZ, twentieth-century Guatemalan poet

Serves 6 to 8

THIS SIMPLE SOUP reflects the hardscrabble life of Indian farmers, who grow lots of potatoes but for whom meat of any kind is a great luxury. A meat soup, reserved for weddings and other high festivals, should not be complicated by vegetables and seasonings, but rather savored in small portions for its own pure meatiness. The small tamales, though, serve as rich corny dumplings and make this a very special soup indeed.

FOR THE SOUP

3 pounds boneless lamb, cut into bite-size cubes

2 large onions, cut into cubes

8 cups (2 quarts) cold water

2 teaspoons salt, or to taste

FOR 40 SMALL CORN FLOUR TAMALES (TAMALITOS PACHES)

4 cups masa harina (instant cornmeal mix for making tortillas)

4 cups (1 quart) cold water

2 teaspoons salt

½ cup corn oil

Mashan (palm) leaves or—and I recommend this—forty 6-inch squares of aluminum foil (a modern convenience that is so easy to use that you’ll actually make the tamales instead of just thinking about it)

TO PREPARE

1. For the soup, cube the lamb and the onions.

2. For the tamales, mix the masa, water, salt, and corn oil into a paste. For each tamale, spoon a heaping tablespoon of the paste onto a 6-inch square of aluminum foil (or mashan leaves, if you have them). Match opposite edges of the square and double-fold it to seal, then twist each end tightly a couple of times so you end up with what looks like a fat saltwater taffy or firecracker party favor. Continue until you use up all the paste.

TO COOK

1. In a large soup pot, combine the lamb, onions, and water. Bring to a boil over medium heat, then reduce the heat to low and simmer, covered, until the lamb is tender, about 1½ hours. Do not skim the foam, as it should remain to intensify the meatiness of the soup. Season with the salt.

2. Bring about 2 cups of water to a boil over medium-high heat in a large pot and add the tamale packets. Reduce the heat to low, cover tightly with a lid, and steam the tamales for 1 hour.

TO SERVE

Ladle the soup into bowls. Hand around the tamales, inviting your guests to untwist them and pop them into their soup bowls to eat like dumplings.

RIDDLE ME THIS

QUESTION: What kind of ear cannot hear?

HUNGARY
CHICKEN SOUP WITH “SNAIL” PASTA

TYÚKHÚSLEVES

“IN PRAISE OF BOUILLON”

Shine oh eyes, drool oh mouth with joy: the delicious bouillon is ladled up, served right in front of you.
Look, how golden yellow it is, glistening, and how nose-titillating its smell is! What a taste! Ambrosia!
Surely it has its own soul—this is what you really need—
Do you divine—tell me—its marrowbone, its aromatic vegetables, and its spicy soul of ginger that cures all ills?—Believe me, this is the only thing to live for, this is the direct line to salvation, otherwise you are a bitter toothless dog, barking at the world—not transported beyond by this heavenly morsel of heavenly ham.

—BERDA JÓZSEF (1902-1966), “the vagabond poet of Budapest salons,” also known as the “Saint Francis of Hungarian poetry,” the “Sacrificer of Well-Laid Tables,” the “Patron Saint of Poke Puddings,” and the “Exarch of Geese”

Serves 6 to 8

ORDINARILY MADE IN huge quantities for a typical country wedding feast, this soup is very rich but pure—a strong broth with special homemade pasta in the shape of little snails, traditionally made by the friends of the bride. The soup is always served as the first course of the feast after the wedding, and is followed by the cooks being invited to dance at a “snail stomping.” Because making the “snails” requires laboriously rolling the pasta dough around a stick on a ribbed board, I have substituted either small shell pasta or gemelli pasta. I brought some “snails”—csiga tészta— back home from a trip to Eger, though, and they are adorable. I don’t think anything could be sweeter than to begin wedded bliss with a white soup plate full of crystalline chicken broth that is stuffed with these funny ribbed coils.

4 pounds chicken, cut into pieces

A few chicken feet, with their nails clipped off (optional)

1 tablespoon salt

1 teaspoon black peppercorns

12 cups (3 quarts) cold water

2 carrots, trimmed, scrubbed, and chopped

2 parsley roots, trimmed, scrubbed, and chopped (or 1 parsnip)

1 small celery root, peeled and chopped (or chopped celery)

1 kohlrabi, trimmed, scrubbed, and chopped (can also use cabbage or turnip)

2 garlic cloves

1 small onion

1 cup small shell pasta or gemelli pasta

TO PREPARE

Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

1. Place the chicken pieces in a high-sided soup pot and sprinkle with the salt and peppercorns. Pour the cold water on top. Bring to a boil over medium heat, then reduce the heat to low and simmer, uncovered, for 30 minutes, not removing or stirring in the scum.

2. Add the vegetables, but don’t stir them. Return the broth briefly to a boil over high heat, then reduce the heat again, partially cover, and simmer for another hour. Take the soup off the heat and let sit for 10 minutes.

3. Carefully ladle the soup through a strainer lined with moistened cheesecloth into a clean pot. You do not want to cloud the soup by pouring it through the strainer. Discard the solids. Cool down to room temperature, uncovered, if you plan to refrigerate before serving, to avoid clouding the broth.

4. In a separate large pot, bring at least 8 cups of water to a boil. Add a tablespoon of salt and pour in the pasta. Cook until tender. Drain and reserve.

TO SERVE

Reheat the broth to a boil and taste it to make sure it is well seasoned. Stir in the cooked pasta, and let the flavors mix for a minute or two. Take the pot out to the table and ladle the soup into bowls.

“EVER THUS AND AS YOU WERE”

In this classic Hungarian folktale, a poor but clever soldier, discharged from the army, seeks his fortune from his commander-inchief, the King. The King, as kings are wont to do, gives him an impossible task: “You can be my coachman,” he says, “if you hitch up my horses, drive them to the Royal forest, fill their cart with timber, and drive back by sundown.” It turns out, of course, that the horses are old, skinny, and at death’s door. Even so, that soldier gives it his best shot. Just at the point of failure, he does a favor for a poor old man in the forest—and is repaid a thousand times over when the old man gives him two magic commands to use. “Just say, ‘Ever thus’ to someone,” the old man says, “and he or she will do what you want at lightning speed and without stopping. Then, just say, ‘As you were,’ and that poor soul will finally be able to stop.” The soldier puts these commands to good purpose, and not just to get those horses back to the King to secure the coachman job. No, he almost immediately sets his sights on the youngest daughter of the King, a beautiful princess if there ever was one. Alas, she is to be married the next day.

Disconsolate, he wanders through the dazzling halls of the castle until he comes to the banquet room. There are the Princess and her bridegroom eating tyúkhúsleves—chicken soup with snail pasta. He sneaks up behind them and whispers, “Ever thus!” Instantly they begin eating at top speed, bowl after bowl, growing so fat they can hardly sit in their chairs. The Queen looks over and says, “Mercy, aren’t you ashamed of yourselves, you pigs?” and she just keeps on and on talking about how much they are eating. So the soldier leans over in mid-sentence and says, “Ever thus!” Oh my, now the Queen can’t stop talking and her voice gets louder and louder and louder until the King finally comes over to shut her up … but suddenly he hiccups, maybe from the flagon of tokaj wine he’s just drunk. “Ever thus!” whispers the soldier—and now the King can’t stop hiccuping. The place is in an uproar, with people running about, plates and dishes crashing and smashing, the King hiccuping, the Queen gabbling, the bridegroom and the adorable Princess shoveling in the tyúkhúsleves as fast as they can—what a mess!

“Help!—hic’—soldier! Help us—hic!” the King cries. “Help—hic!—and I’ll give you—hic!— half my kingdom!”

“It’s not your kingdom I want,” says the soldier, “it’s your daughter.”

“Princess—hic!—what do you say?”

“Oh yes,” she wails, “if only I could stop eating.” As the soldier and the King shake hands to seal the deal, the soldier says, “As you were!” Ahhh, the hiccups stop. “As you were!” to the Queen. Ahh, the words die on her lips. “As you were!” to the Princess and the hapless bridegroom. That bridegroom slinks away, leaving a trail of chicken soup behind him.

The Princess and the soldier are married before you could say, “Good King Mattias.” “Oh,” says she, “I liked you the minute I clapped eyes on you.”

“Are you happy?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says sweetly.

“Ever thus!” says the soldier. And since he hasn’t yet said, “As you were!” to her, it’s a fact that they lived happily ever after.

ITALY
WEDDING SOUP WITH MEATBALLS

ZUPPA MARITATA

DANTE WOOS HIS BEATRICE

Within my Lady’s eyes abideth Love,
Hence where she looks all things must needs grow kind,
And when she passeth all men glance behind,
And those she greeteth such fond raptures prove
That from each downcast face the colour fades
And every fault repentance doth inspire:
Before her flee presumptuousness and ire;
Help me to do her honour, gentle maids!
The heart which heareth her when she doth speak Becometh, through her virtue, pure and meek,
Hence praise to who beholds her first is due;
The vision of her softly smiling face
In neither speech nor memory hath place,
It is a miracle so sweet and new.

—DANTE ALIGHIERI, fourteenth-century Italian poet

Serves 6 to 8

ZUPPA MARITATA IS one of the most requested soups on my website, www.soupsong.com, a wedding soup from Abruzzo that features the meatballs traditional to that part of Italy. It’s a pretty soup, and very substantial with all those meatballs. The torn escarole floats on the broth, enriched by the meat and molten cheese. This dish is flavorful yet subtle, something to throw a bouquet about. For nonbridal occasions, it can be a proper meal for four persons.

FOR THE MEATBALLS

½ pound ground veal

½ pound ground sirloin beef

1 egg, slightly beaten

½ cup fresh bread crumbs

¼ cup minced fresh parsley

½ cup finely grated Romano cheese

pinch of nutmeg

Salt and pepper to taste

FOR THE SOUP

8 cups (2 quarts) chicken Stock

2 cups washed and torn escarole, in little pieces

¼ cup freshly grated Romano cheese, or more to serve

TO PREPARE

1. An hour ahead, mix the veal, beef, egg, bread crumbs, parsley, grated cheese, nutmeg, salt, and pepper until the paste is uniform, but be careful not to overwork it. Form the paste into small meatballs (about the size of oversized marbles)—about 50 of them—arrange them on a baking sheet, and cook them in a 350°F. oven for about 30 minutes. They should still be tender and not too brown. Drain off the fat, then transfer to paper towels to drain the fat completely.

2. Prep the remaining ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

Bring the chicken stock to a boil in a large soup pot over medium-high heat. Add the escarole, cover, and boil for 5 minutes. Add the meatballs, reduce the heat to low, and bring back to a simmer. Let the soup simmer, covered, for a few minutes, then stir in the grated cheese.

TO SERVE

Ladle the soup into bowls, evenly distributing the meatballs among them, and serve immediately, sprinkling with more cheese, if you like. Pass more grated cheese on the side for your guests to help themselves.

ITALIAN WEDDING SOUP AT THE U.S. MASTERS

Not just for newlyweds! Bernhard Langer, a German golf pro, ordered this soup in 1993, his prerogative as reigning U.S. Masters champion, to be served at the traditional Champion’s Dinner at the Augusta National Golf Club on the eve of the tournament. This menu-selecting tradition was begun in 1952 by Ben Hogan.

EGG AND WINE HONEYMOON SOUP

GINESTRATA

CINNAMON DROPS AT AN ELOPEMENT

And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d,
While he from forth the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon …

—JOHN KEATS, nineteenth-century English poet, from his Italianate “The Eve of Saint Agnes,” in which Porphyro stages an exotic vision in fair Madeline’s bedroom in hopes of eloping with her

Serves 2

THIS RICH NORTHERN Italian soup goes all the way back to medieval times in Tuscany, when families would humorously prepare it to revive the flagging spirits of the bride and groom the morning after their wedding. Like a thin, savory zabaglione, it is sweet enough to pump up the newlyweds, mellow enough to restore their perspective, and so highly nutritious that they won’t miss a night’s loss of sleep. That said, it’s also a suggestive way to start a romantic cold supper with the one you love … or any supper, for that matter. This recipe may be multiplied to serve four … or even eight if you’d like to try an unusual dinner-party course.

3 egg yolks

¼ cup dry Marsala wine

1½ cups heated chicken stock, without a scrap of fat in it pinch of cinnamon

2 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened

¼ teaspoon sugar mixed with a pinch of nutmeg, for garnish

TO PREPARE

Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list. Warm the serving bowls.

TO COOK

1. Bring water to a simmer over medium heat in the bottom of a double boiler.

2. In the top pan of the double boiler, off the heat, beat the egg yolks with a whisk until they are thick and light yellow in color. Then, bit by bit, whip in the Marsala, chicken broth, and cinnamon.

3. Fit the soup pot over the simmering water (not in it) and cook over medium heat, whisking constantly with a whisk, as you add the butter, spoonful by spoonful, very slowly.

4. When the soup starts to thicken—it will coat the spoon, but never get very thick—remove it from the heat.

TO SERVE

Ladle the soup into warmed, elegant bowls and sprinkle with the sugar and nutmeg mixture.

JAPAN
FRESH CLAM SOUP

HAMAGURI NO SUMASHI-JIRU

“WHAT A LITTLE GIRL HAD ON HER MIND”

What a little girl had on her mind was:
Why do the shoulders of other men’s wives give off so strong a smell like magnolia; or like gardenias? What is it, that faint veil of mist, over the shoulders of other men’s wives?
She wanted to have one, that wonderful thing even the prettiest virgin cannot have.

The little girl grew up.
She became a wife and then a mother. One day she suddenly realized; the tenderness that gathers over the shoulders of wives, is only fatigue from loving others day after day.

—IBARAGL NORLKO,
twentieth-century Japanese poet

Serves 8

THIS DELICATE SOUP is served at Shinto wedding feasts precisely to symbolize the union of the happy couple through the paired valves of the clam. It is also typically served on March 3 every year for Girl’s Day, when Japanese people pray for the wealth and happiness of their daughters and set up special hina dolls to celebrate the occasion. I recommend you find and use soup bowls with lids—ideally lacquer—for serving this soup. Why? Because the presentation is dramatic in beauty and fragrance when each person removes the lid, gazes into the soup, and inhales the lemony brine aroma. It’s delicious, too—light and stimulating.

16 small hard-shell clams (asari, if possible)

2 thick green onions (called negi in Japanese), green part only, cut into eight 1½-inch pieces on the diagonal

8 pieces fresh lemon or lime peel (Japanese yuzu, if you can get it), cut into 2 × ¾-inch rectangles that are scraped of all white pith

8 cups Japanese Soup Stock (dashi)

1 tablespoon saké

¼ teaspoon soy sauce, or to taste

TO PREPARE

1. Two hours ahead, start the clams soaking in cold salt water. Then scrub, rinse, and drain the clams.

2. Prep the green onions as directed in the recipe list.

3. Cut deep notches in the top and bottom long sides of the lemon or lime rectangles, so each piece looks like a capital N, then cross the legs of the N over each other to make a triangle shape known as the “pine needle cut.” Set the pieces aside.

4. Heat the serving bowls and their lids in the oven or, if they are lacquer, by filling them with hot water.

TO COOK

In a wide soup pot, bring the dashi to a boil over medium-high heat, then add the clams in a single layer, cover, and cook until the clams just open, about 3 minutes. Remove the pot from the heat and reserve the broth. Take out the clams and remove the clam meat from the shells, being careful to end up with eight shells whose halves are still joined together.

TO SERVE

1. Place one double shell in each of the eight warmed Japanese soup bowls, filling each side of each shell with clam meat, then covering the bowls with their lids.

2. Reheat the broth, adding the saké and a few drops of soy sauce, then ladle it over the clams, being careful not to stir up any sand that might still be in the bottom of the pot. Arrange the green onion pieces and the citrus peel in each bowl and cover the bowls with lids.

3. Serve immediately, allowing each person to remove the lid, regard the soup, and inhale its fragrance.

WHAT IS JAPANESE SOY SAUCE?

It’s extraordinary. Today called shöyu, soy sauce started out as a revolution against the ancient uoshōyu (made of fermented fish, like today’s Southeast Asian fish sauces nuoc mam and nam pla). When the Japanese embraced Buddhism and adopted vegetarianism as a way of life, they turned away from fish and looked to plant-based seasonings, the Chinese soybean in particular. Then they proceeded to take soy sauce to a whole new level.

Tamari shöyu was developed by A.D. 775. It’s rich and thick, a product made exclusively from fermenting soybeans. Today’s shōyu wasn’t perfected until the seventeenth century. It is made from steamed soybeans mixed with parched and cracked wheat grains, then cultured for three days with the same mold used to make miso and dashi. This mash is then added to salted water and stored in cedar barrels for at least two summers, the longer the better. Finally, it is strained and pressed, pasteurized, and bottled. Of course, many of today’s soy sauces are made with shortcuts taken, with proportional cuts in quality. If you can find Kanro shöyu, though, grab it: it’s a handmade sauce produced only in the city of Yanai and is known for its umami, the “tastiness factor” in Japanese cooking that is reputed to be beyond sweet, sour, salty, and bitter.

MOROCCO
WEDDING LAMB SOUP WITH RICE AND BEANS

HARIRA

FROM THE GULISTAN

Whose wife is tender, wise, and true,
In fact, Beloved, just like you,
Although he merits no such thing
Will live, as I do, like a King.

—SAADL,
thirteenth-century Persian poet

Serves 6 to 8

THIS SPECIAL WEDDING version of the rich, lemony harira that traditionally breaks the fast during Ramadan uses rice as a symbolic ingredient and dispenses with the eggs used to thicken traditional harira recipes. It’s wonderful, as all hariras are, and a great start to both an extravagant banquet and wedded bliss.

1½ cups dried chickpeas, or two 15-ounce cans chickpeas, drained and rinsed

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 pound boneless lamb, cubed into bite-size pieces

2 medium onions, chopped

1 large red pepper, seeded and chopped (hot or sweet, as you prefer)

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 cup chopped fresh cilantro

½ cup chopped fresh parsley

2 pounds ripe or canned tomatoes, chopped, juice reserved

1 cup red lentils, washed and picked through for stones

10 cups (2½ quarts) water

½ cup rice

Salt to taste

Cinnamon and lemon slices, for garnish

TO PREPARE

1. The night before, soak the dried chickpeas overnight in lots of water. The next morning, drain and husk the chickpeas by rubbing them between your palms.

2. Prep the remaining ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

1. Heat the oil over low heat in a large soup pot, then add the lamb, onions, red pepper, cinnamon, black pepper, ½ cup of the cilantro, and the parsley. Cook, stirring, over medium-low heat for 5 minutes.

2. Add the tomatoes, turn the heat to medium, and continue cooking for another 15 minutes.

3. Stir in the lentils, chickpeas (unless you’re using canned chickpeas), reserved juice from the tomatoes, and the water, then bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce the heat to low and simmer, partially covered, for l½ hours.

4. Add the rice and cook another 30 minutes. If you’re using canned chickpeas, add them now.

5. Stir in the remaining ½ cup of cilantro and the salt. Let simmer for another 5 minutes.

TO SERVE

Ladle the soup into festive pottery bowls and sprinkle with cinnamon, pinching the grains between your thumb and forefinger to get a fine dusting. Serve lemon slices on the side—or you may pass around tiny bowls of fresh lemon juice with tiny spoons on the side. My family was served harira with bowls of lemon juice at a dinner hosted by a friend remotely connected to the Moroccan royal family, and I watched my lemon-loving young daughter across the low-slung table methodically spoon some 30 spoonfuls into her soup until she’d delicately emptied the entire bowl.

CILANTRO/CORIANDER-THE TWOFER HERB

This member of the parsley family is now in the produce sections of most supermarkets, but I’d never seen nor heard of it in 1983, when I first set foot in the souks of Morocco and found it everywhere, called “Moroccan parsley.” Love at first bite. Native to southern Europe, cilantro has been cultivated for thousands of years by many, many cultures—for its seeds (often called coriander, from the Greek koris, or “bed bug,” because of the buggy smell of the seeds when they’re still green) and for its leaves (often called cilantro, its Spanish name). In ancient Egypt, the seeds were bruised to mix with bread. Romans prescribed the leaves, freshly chopped, for invalids and brought the plant with them to England. There, in Tudor times, the seeds were part of a highly spiced wedding drink called Hippocras—perhaps for their reputed aphrodisiac effect—and, indeed, if consumed in large quantities, coriander acts as a narcotic. What else does it do? It combats flatulence, and women throughout the Arab world chew the seeds to ease labor pains.

TURKEY
BRIDE SOUP

EZO GELIN ÇORBASI

Serves 6 to 8

THIS RICH TURKISH SOUP is attributed to an astonishingly beautiful girl born in 1909 in the village of Dokuzyol, located on ancient caravan routes in Turkey’s Barak plain. Ezo had red cheeks and black hair and was adored by camel riders who stopped by her house for water. Her story ends badly, though; her first marriage to a villager was unhappy and she was permitted to forsake him on grounds of maltreatment. Her second marriage took her to Syria and a mother-in-law who couldn’t be pleased—and for whom, it is said, she haplessly created this soup. Ezo died of tuberculosis in Syria in 1952, but in the interim had become a legend in her native land in both folk song and film. Her name lives on in this very popular, oniony, and stick-to-the-ribs soup, which is now traditionally fed to new brides right before their wedding to sustain them for what lies ahead.

6 tablespoons (¾ stick) butter

3 medium onions, finely chopped

2 teaspoons paprika

1½ cups red lentils, washed and picked over

¾ cup fine-grain bulgur wheat

10 cups (2½ quarts) Vegetable or Beef Stock

3 tablespoons tomato paste

¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper or red pepper flakes

2 tablespoons dried mint leaves

Lemon slices and fresh small mint leaves or parsley, for garnish

TO PREPARE

Prep the ingredients as directed on the recipe list.

TO COOK

1. Heat the butter over low heat in a large soup pot and sauté the onions until they are golden, about 15 minutes. Stir in the paprika, then the lentils and bulgur to coat them in the butter.

2. Add the stock, tomato paste, and cayenne; bring to a boil over medium-high heat, then reduce the heat to low and simmer until the bulgur is soft and creamy, about 1 hour.

3. Crumble the mint between your palms into the soup. Stir the soup and remove it from the heat. Let the soup rest for 10 minutes, covered.

TO SERVE

Ladle the soup into bowls and garnish each portion with a lemon slice and one or two mint leaves.

NASRETTIN HOCA AT A WEDDING PARTY

One day, Nasrettin Hoca was invited to a wedding. He arrived in his shabby, everyday clothing, and no one seemed to take any notice of him. He didn’t like this a bit, and slipped out unnoticed. When he returned, he was wearing his best robe and his fine fur coat. At once people greeted him and showered him with compliments. He was given the best seat at the table and urged to eat the tastiest morsels. Smiling, he dipped the sleeve of his fur coat into the soup and said, “Here, help yourself, dear fur coat.” Everyone was amazed and asked what he was doing. “Why, I was just inviting my coat to enjoy this excellent soup since it seems to command so much respect. A few minutes ago, without my fur coat, I wasn’t even noticed, so I think it is the one that deserves the honor of feasting.”

—NASRETTIN, also known as Nasrudin and Yehá, is a fabled folklore figure throughout the Islamic world, but is specially claimed by Turkey, that says this real-life holy man was born in the village of Ak Shehir (Eskishehr) in the fifteenth century.

SPICY BEEF WEDDING SOUP

DUGUN ÇORBASI

A “HUMOROUS” TURKISH SONG

Your father, O beautiful one! Has so often screamed and shouted,
And lowered the price of your dowry,
And said, “My daughters are beautiful!”

Serves 6 to 8

IN THE OLD DAYS, wedding celebrations in Turkey lasted forty days and forty nights. Today, they have been compressed to three at the most, with lots of gift giving and henna painting, but many are just overnight celebrations at a local hotel. Even so, Dugun çorbasi continues to mark the celebration. This hearty soup is traditionally served after the ceremony, beginning the banquet.

½ cup (1 stick) butter

2 pounds boneless lamb or beef, finely diced or ground
     (mutton is traditional, but lamb is really much better)

2 carrots, peeled and finely chopped

2 medium onions, finely chopped

8 cups (2 quarts) Beef Stock

4 egg yolks

1 lemon, juiced

GARNISH

Bread for 32 small croutons

2 tablespoons butter

1 tablespoon paprika

Cayenne pepper to taste

Ground cinnamon

TO PREPARE

Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list. Also, cut 32 cubes of bread and make them into croutons for the garnish by toasting them in a 350°F. oven until they are dry and crisp, 5 to 10 minutes.

TO COOK

1. Melt the butter over low heat in a large soup pot, then add the meat, carrots, and onions and sauté for 10 minutes. Gradually stir in the stock, scraping up any bits stuck on the bottom of the pan. Bring to a boil over high heat, then reduce the heat to low and simmer, partially covered, for 1 hour.

2. Remove the soup from the heat. Beat the egg yolks in a small bowl, then beat the lemon juice into them and slowly stir into the soup. Cover the soup and let it rest while you finalize the soup garnishes.

3. In a small skillet, heat the butter and quickly sauté the paprika and cayenne in it. Take off the heat immediately.

TO SERVE

Ladle the soup into bowls. Then, swirl scant teaspoons of the paprika seasoning equally into the individual bowls. Top each portion with croutons and a dusting of cinnamon.

NASRETTIN HOCA AND THE WEDDING SOUP

On his way to preach at a mountain village, Nasrettin Hoca, the Turkish sage, was lost in an unexpected snowstorm. The next morning, the villagers found him half frozen under an oak tree, some distance from the village inn. When he came to himself, he thanked them for saving his life. “I kept myself warm by watching the glow of the inn’s light,” he told them. The villagers were delighted that they had saved Hoca’s life, and they asked him for a show of appreciation. He agreed and said he would prepare a feast for them. The next night, all the villagers showed up at the inn and sang and danced in happy expectation of the feast that was being prepared for them. Time passed and Hoca continued to rush back and forth between the dining room and the kitchen, but still no food appeared. Finally the villagers lost patience and insisted that he hurry and serve them as they were becoming very hungry. “A festive occasion like this calls for a wedding soup,” he answered.

“Come and see how it is being prepared.” In the kitchen they found a huge cauldron hanging from the ceiling with a tiny candle underneath.

“You don’t expect this candle to cook the soup, do you,” they shouted with annoyance.

“Why not?” Hoca answered. “If the glow of the inn’s light can keep a poor soul in the forest warmed up, surely a candle can cook a cauldron of wedding soup.”

—For another Nasrettin story, and a little history about this fifteenth-century Sufi Master, see NASRETTIN HOCA AT A WEDDING PARTY.

8
TO HONOR THE DEAD

“DEATH IS SITTING AT THE FOOT OF MY BED”

My bed is unmade: sheets on the floor
and blankets ready to fly out the door.
Ms. Death announces she’ll make up the bed.
I beg her not to bother: just leave it like that.
She insists and replies that our date’s for tonight,
Snuggles down and adds that she’s in love and in the mood.
I answer that I’ve made a promise, on the level,
not to two-time life. She says go to the Devil.
Ms. Death is sitting at the foot of my bed.
This wretched Lady Death has got the hots for me
and wants to suck me drier than a fig plucked off a tree.
Now she wants to lie down for a minute by my side
just to sleep a little, I need not be afraid.
From respect, I don’t suggest her reputation’s not so good.
Ms. Death is sitting at the foot of my bed.

—ÓSCAR HAHN, twentieth-century Mexican poet

ONCE UPON A TIME, ancient man conceived of death as the beginning of a journey to another world. Not extinction, mind you, but a passage. Thus was the life of the spirit born. And no matter how advanced the civilization, like dynasties in Egypt and China, or rudimentary, like Germanic, Turkic, and Amerind tribes, all sent their leaders off on this journey with food to sustain them. Sometimes the food was real; sometimes pictures of it were drawn at the place of burial.

With the rise of monotheistic religions, though, earthly food traditions began to move out of the caskets and onto the tables of the mourners. Why soup? Because it stretched meager food supplies. It was the ideal food in times when community mourning was common, when people didn’t have much food, and when soup could make that food go a long way … and warm people’s bellies besides, either before or after the graveyard ceremony.

The traditional recipes that follow make a generous number of portions to feed the guests who mourn with you. All, however, are excellent soups in their own right and are easy to double for larger gatherings or halve for small family dinners.

FRANCE
SAFFRON SOUP

PÉRIGOURDINE LE MOURTAÏROL

RIDDLE ME THIS

QUESTION: What is it?
“It has neither mouth, nor teeth, nor bowels;
Yet it eats its food steadily.
It has neither village, nor home, nor hands, nor feet;
Yet it wanders everywhere;
It has neither country, nor means, nor office, nor pay;
Yet it is ready for a fight always.
By day and by night there is wailing about it.
It has no breath, yet to all it appears.”

Serves 6 to 8

IN PÉRIGORD, FRANCE, this bread soup is traditionally served after funerals. Heavy with saffron, thick, and hearty, it certainly goes back to medieval times. Too bad it’s so closely associated with death: it’s a wonderful—and beautiful—soup, maybe worth resurrecting, say, for occasions when you need a ceremonial dish to put something officially behind you.

1 loaf stale French bread, cut into thin slices

1 cup diced cooked chicken

2 carrots, peeled and sliced into thin rounds

8 cups (2 quarts) rich Chicken Stock

¼ teaspoon saffron, ground or crushed to a powder

TO PREPARE

Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list. Preheat the oven to 400°F.

TO COOK

1. Make one layer of bread slices in the bottom of a deep casserole, sprinkle with chicken pieces and carrot rounds, then continue to layer the bread-chicken-carrots until all the ingredients are used, ending with bread on top. Don’t layer to the top of the pot or the soup will splash in the oven.

2. Heat the chicken stock in a saucepan over medium heat. In a small cup, mix the crushed saffron with several tablespoons of the hot broth and let it steep for about 5 minutes, for the saffron color and flavor to be completely released. It will be a dark orange liquid. Stir this into the rest of the stock, then ladle over the casserole. When the top layer of bread slices begins to float, gently add about another cup of broth.

3. Put the casserole, uncovered, in the oven and reduce the heat to 350°F.

4. Check back in about 1 hour; most of the liquid will be absorbed and a gratin will have formed on the top.

TO SERVE

Ladle the soup into flat soup plates and serve immediately.

“OBLIVION”

Vast black slumber falls deep
On my life which expires—
All hopes, go to sleep,
Go to sleep, all desires.

I see nothing; Night fills
Me; remembrances fail
Of past good and past ills.
O the poor sorry tale!

I a cradle in gloom
That a hand seems to brush
In the depths of a tomb:
Silence, hush!…

—PAUL VERLAINE, nineteenth-century French “decadent” poet

IRELAND
COTTAGE BROTH FOR THE WAKE

SOUP AT THE WAKE

In Leon Uris’s Trinity, his novel about Ireland before the Easter Rising of 1916, “Grandfar” Kilty Larkin dies in the first page of the book and his proper wake begins in the next chapter, with the food, tobacco, whiskey, Banshee stories, and keening described in glorious and wide-eyed detail.

“Kilty Larkin looked ever so grand laid out in the best room…. They knelt, intoned a quick prayer and drifted to the fringes of the room. Brigid had filled dozens of small clay pipes with tobacco which had supernatural qualities at times like this, and offered them about with a plate of snuff to hasten Kilty’s journey and resurrection. Three lambs had been slaughtered and an immense stew boiled in the great pot and a dozen loaves of fadge, a potato bread, browned on the baking boards….”

Serves 6 to 8

SO THICK WITH vegetables and barley, and so rich with lamb shank meat and broth—it’s enough to bring the dead back to life, or at the very least sustain the mourners through their long evening of smoking, drinking, and telling stories.

FOR THE BROTH

2 pounds lamb shanks

8 cups (2 quarts) cold water

1 medium onion, quartered

2 celery stalks with leaves, chopped into big pieces

2 carrots, scrubbed and chopped into big pieces

2 bay leaves

½ teaspoon black peppercorns

2 teaspoons salt

FOR THE SOUP

¼ cup barley

3 tablespoons butter

2 leeks, washed and sliced well into the green

1 medium onion, diced

3 carrots, peeled and diced

2 celery stalks with leaves, diced

2 medium turnips, peeled and diced

1 cup finely shredded cabbage

1 teaspoon dried thyme

Salt and pepper to taste

TO PREPARE

1. The day before, prepare the broth and meat. Roast the lamb shanks in a 400°F. oven until well browned, then place in a pot with the cold water, onion, celery, carrots, bay leaves, peppercorns, and salt. Bring to a boil over medium heat, then reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer for 3 hours, until the meat is very tender.

2. Remove the meat from the broth. Strain the broth, discarding the solids; let cool, then refrigerate. Cut the fat and tissues away from the meat, then cut the meat into small pieces and reserve in the refrigerator until you are ready to make the soup.

3. Also the day before, put the barley in plenty of water to soak overnight.

4. The next day, prep the remaining ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

1. Heat the butter in a large soup pot over medium heat and stir in the leeks, onion, carrots, celery, and turnips. Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, while the vegetables sweeten, about 5 minutes. Stir in the cabbage and cook for 5 more minutes, until the vegetables are tender.

2. Meanwhile, remove the fat from the soup stock and discard or save for another purpose. Pour the stock into the vegetables, adding enough water to make 8 cups. Drain the barley and stir into the soup. Add the reserved lamb and also the thyme, crumbling it between your palms. Stir well, bring the soup to a boil over medium-high heat, then reduce the heat to low, cover, and let simmer for another hour, until the barley is tender. Season with salt and pepper.

TO SERVE

Ladle the soup into bowls and serve with hot potato bread, cheeses, tobacco, and lots of liquor … and get ready to talk of the Banshee.

“THE BALLAD OF FATHER O’HART”

—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, twentieth-century Irish poet

PHILIPPINES
CRYSTAL NOODLE AND CHICKEN SOUP

SOANGHON

RIDDLE ME THIS

QUESTION: What am I?
“The man who made it did not want it;
The man who bought it did not use it;
The man who used it did not know it.”

Serves 6 to 8

ACCORDING TO GILDA CORDERO-FERNANDO, in Philippine Food and Life, after a death “the corpse was kept in the house for three days, and these were the days of feasting. The widow was supposed to cook her grief away in a river of sotanghon or bami….” And well she might. This is a dramatic and unusual soup—a bloodred broth stuffed with big chunks of chicken flesh and a mass of clear yellow noodles. Sound gory-looking? It is—along the lines of some Francis Bacon portraits I’ve seen that look like they’re missing their skin. But this soup is also fragrant, savory, tart, overstuffed, and just flat-out delicious—it will take your breath away. And did I tell you those long noodles are slippery? Serve with forks or chopsticks as well as spoons. Many thanks to dear friend Art Meyer for tracking down this tradition.

8 cups (2 quarts) cold water

Lard or chicken fat for frying

4 to 5 pounds chicken, cut up (with liver and gizzard)

1 cup chopped green onions, white and green parts

Salt and pepper to taste

2 tablespoons peanut oil

15 garlic cloves, sliced

1 medium onion, diced

2 hot chile peppers (or to taste), seeded and finely diced

2 teaspoons annatto (achiote) powder (pulverize the seeds with hammer or pestle if you can’t find powder)

6 ounces (about 2 cups) cellophane noodles (bean threads)

1 tablespoon patis (or nuoc mam/nam pla) fish sauce, or more to taste

GARNISH

8 garlic cloves, sliced

Diagonal slices of green onion

1 calamansi (a very acidic hybrid of the mandarin orange and kumquat) or lime

TO PREPARE

1. You might consider making the broth the day before (steps 1 to 3) and refrigerating it. It makes it so easy to finalize the soup—just minutes to remove the congealed fat from the broth, sauté the giblets and seasonings, cook the noodles, and toss together with the chicken pieces.

2. Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list to include the garnish: frying the garlic slices in a little peanut oil until crisp, then draining on paper towels; thinly slicing the green onion; and slicing wedges of calamansi or lime.

TO COOK

1. Pour the cold water into a large soup pot and keep handy.

2. Melt the fat in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Brown the chicken parts in the fat and add them to the cold water in the soup pot. Begin heating the soup over medium heat, then toss in the green onions, salt, and pepper, and bring to a slow boil. Reduce the heat and simmer until the chicken is tender and falling off the bone. Depending on the age and toughness of the chicken, this could take as long as 2 hours.

3. Strain the soup, removing the chicken and discarding the vegetable solids. Return the broth to the pot, skimming any fat. Let the chicken cool, uncovered, then shred and reserve, discarding the skin and bones. (You may refrigerate the broth at this point.) Cut the liver and gizzard into small pieces and reserve them apart from the chicken.

4. Heat the peanut oil in a skillet over medium heat and fry the garlic for 1 minute. Toss in the onion and sauté until transparent, then add the liver and gizzard pieces, the diced chiles, and the annatto powder and sauté, stirring constantly, for 2 minutes. Remove from the heat and set aside.

5. Bring the broth in the soup pot back to a low boil over medium heat and add the noodles, simmering them for 5 minutes. Add the shredded chicken, the sautéed vegetables from the skillet (washing the skillet with the broth to get every scrap of seasoning into the soup), and the fish sauce. Simmer for 5 more minutes. Taste for seasoning, adding more fish sauce as needed.

TO SERVE

Ladle the soup into bowls, evenly distributing the noodles, and garnish each portion with crispy garlic, green onion slices, and a slice of calamansi or lime.

“SUNS HAVE GONE”

Beneath the arcade of flame
     trees,
My love walks alone,
A frail creature from whose
     eyes
The twelfth sun has gone.

As she goes by feeling her
     way
With a swaying bamboo cane,
A panel of kindly faces wears
A long tender look of pain.

Sitting on a familiar stone,
Where she held hands with
     me,
Tears of lost desires flow
     down
The stony bone of her
     memory.

Beneath the deflowered trees,
My love still walks alone,
A gray woman in whose
     enfeebled eyes
Suns have brightly shone.

—OSCAR DE ZUÑLGA, twentieth-century Filipino poet

PART III

“THE FURY OF RAINSTORMS”

The rain drums down like red ants,
each bouncing off my window
These ants are in great pain
and they cry out as they hit,
as if their little legs were only
stitched on and their heads pasted.
And oh they bring to mind the grave,
so humble, so willing to be beat upon
with its awful lettering and
the body lying underneath
without an umbrella.

Depression is boring, I think,
and I would do better to make
some soup and light up the cave.

—ANNE SEXTON, 1974

9
TO LOSE WEIGHT

ONCE UPON A TIME, soup was primarily prescribed to stimulate the appetite, not depress it.

Oh, right. Mmmm. But those were the days when even the leisure classes got a fair amount of exercise (no cars), didn’t eat snacks (no refrigeration; mouth-buckling preservatives), and had little concept of “empty calories.” It was also a time when ideal feminine beauty was on the plump side, manly torsos were comfortable, and fleshiness was a sign of affluence and position in a poor, thin world. Not so anymore. And ain’t it great that soup—early on a way to stretch tough and meager ingredients, later a way to tickle dainty taste buds—now, in its soulful adaptability, is one of the most reliable ways around to shed those unwanted pounds.

How so?

For a bunch of reasons, all working together to shrink our burgeoning waistlines.

1. Eating soup at the start of a meal fills the stomach, which signals the brain to curtail appetite. A ten-week study involving ten thousand students at the University of Pennsylvania in the late seventies gave proof to this commonsense observation. Imagine: ten thousand contrary adolescents agreed that when they started a meal with soup, they got full fast and ate less.

2. Eating soup fools the body’s natural sensors into thinking more calories have been consumed than actually have. Dr. Elizabeth Bell, at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted a study in 1999 to determine “if the effect of increasing the water content of food can enhance the effect of that food on satiety, therefore reducing subsequent calorie intake.” That is to say, one day, her cadre of twenty-four women began lunch with a 270-calorie chicken-and-rice casserole; the next day, they started with that same casserole plus they drank a 10-ounce glass of water with it; on the third day, they started with the casserole and water mixed, heated, and served as a soup. After each round, researchers measured exactly how much the women ate during the rest of the meal. Hands-down victory was for the soup: instead of chowing down for 300+ calories at the open buffet, as they had the first two days, the soup eaters daintily pushed their plates away after 200 calories.

3. Eating soup is a low-calorie way of satisfying a person’s need for a certain volume of food. Nutrition researcher Barbara Rolls conducted studies in the late 1990s that show people eat the same weight of food day after day, pretty much no matter what. So you can eat that weight in hamburgers or in tuna fish sandwiches or in candy bars … or you can eat that weight in soup. Now then, if you regularly choose those nice low-calorie soups—say, every day at lunch—you’re going to lose weight. Just that many fewer calories to burn.

4. Eating soup on a regular basis helps you lose weight because it changes your eating patterns. In 1979, Dr. Henry Jordan, behavioral weight-control specialist, made some five hundred volunteers eat soup for lunch every day for ten weeks. His findings? Soup eaters consumed fewer calories and lost an average of 20 percent of their excess body weight. Why? Because soup is complicated to eat—it takes time and motor skills to consume, so you tend to eat less.

Consider: You have to sit down to eat it. You have eat it with a utensil, and you can shovel in only so much of it per spoonful. You can’t gulp it down because it’s hot. If you put it in a big bowl, you’re fooled into thinking you’re eating a big portion. Then, because it comes as a complex package of stuff—different textures, shapes, and tastes all together and all at once—you have to work it around in your mouth, take time to process it. Not to mention worrying about slurping and slopping it all over the place.

Compare eating a 500-calorie bowl of Vietnamese phó, which takes a good 30 minutes of concentrated pleasure to get down, not to mention taking time to wipe the sweat off your forehead, with going to a McDonald’s take-out window so you can wolf down that 560-calorie Big Mac and super-size fries while you’ve still got the blinker on to pull out of the parking lot.

SO, SOUP IS a very good thing for dieters—a sure thing, if you eat it regularly and avoid the crèmes and the beurres—and infinitely interesting and satisfying no matter how often you eat it, whether it’s cool tarator, spicy laksa, rich sopa de camaraõ, or hearty borshch.

But yes, yes. I hear what you’re thinking. What about that seven-day cabbage soup diet that is specially designed to make the pounds fall off? In fact, I like it and believe that soup works within carefully drawn limits—that is, if you want to drop a few pounds fast, rediscover your waist, or most especially, kick-start a longer weight-loss campaign. But remember: it’s for seven days only and you should stop immediately if you feel weak or sick.

QUIPS TO DIET FOR

Diets are for those who are thick and tired of it.

—ANONYMOUS

I’ve been on a constant diet for the last two decades. I’ve lost a total of 789 pounds. By all accounts, I should be hanging from a charm bracelet.

—ERMA BOMBECK

So I think it is very nice for ladies to be lithe and lissome, But not so much that you cut yourself if you happen to embrace or kissome.

—OGDEN NASH, “Curl Up and Diet,” 1938

I never worry about diets. The only carrots that interest me are the number you get in diamonds.

—MAE WEST, 1957

If you have formed the habit of checking on every new diet that comes along, you will find that, mercifully they all blur together, leaving you with only one definitive piece of information: French-fried potatoes are out.

—JEAN KERR, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, 1957

We never repent of having eaten too little.

—THOMAS JEFFERSON, 1820

RIDDLE ME THIS

QUESTION: What is it?
It stands on its one leg with its heart in its head.

THE CABBAGE SOUP DIET

WONDERFULLY PURE, A “vat” of this stuff lasts about a week, depending on how much you eat each day. Eat as much of the soup as you like, as often as you like. Here’s what else you can eat along with the soup, and when:

DAY 1: All fruits except bananas.

DAY 2: All vegetables, raw or cooked. This includes baked potatoes with a little butter.

DAY 3: Fruits and vegetables, but no potatoes or bananas.

DAY 4: Bananas and skim milk—eat as many as 8 bananas and drink as many as 8 glasses of skim milk. You may substitute nonfat yogurt for the milk and flavor it with vanilla or mashed bananas.

DAY 5: Beef, skinless chicken, and/or fish—as much as 20 ounces total. You can also eat 6 tomatoes. And you must drink 8 glasses of water. Don’t forget at least 1 bowl of soup.

DAY 6: Beef, skinless chicken, or fish and vegetables. Drink 8 glasses of water and eat at least 1 bowl of soup.

DAY 7: Brown rice, vegetables, and unsweetened fruit juice.

1 head green cabbage, finely shredded or chopped

2 large onions, chopped

16 to 28 ounces canned tomatoes, chopped, with juices

2 green bell peppers, seeded and chopped

4 celery stalks with leaves, chopped

6 carrots, peeled and sliced

½ pound green beans, stem ends snapped, sliced on the diagonal

Black pepper to taste

Chopped fresh herbs, such as parsley, sage, dill, cilantro, or thyme

GARNISH

Balsamic vinegar or lemon or lime juice

Minced fresh herbs

Chopped green onions

TO PREPARE

Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

Put all the vegetables in a big soup pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil over high heat, then reduce the heat to medium and boil gently for 10 minutes. Cover, reduce the heat to low, and simmer until all the vegetables are soft. Stir in the black pepper and chopped herbs.

TO SERVE

This soup can be served hot or cold. It can be pureed or partially pureed to vary textures. It can be seasoned differently for variety, with balsamic vinegar, lemon or lime juice, different fresh herbs, or chopped green onions.

STARVING ARTIST SOUP

Serves 1 for 2 evening meals

THIS STORY WAS sent to me by Ronnie Reed of Worthington, Ohio, and the story is even (or perhaps much) better than the recipe he enclosed—an inspiration to lovers everywhere. If you’re trying to survive a difficult time, aren’t used to cooking, wouldn’t mind losing a little weight, are yearning to be with the one you love—any or all of these things—I think you’ll be interested in what Ronnie has to say about soup and love.

I’m thirty-one years of age and work for an international business machine company. My wife and I have been married for twelve years. I have grown to love and appreciate soups in general lately. During my separation from my wife, I ate soup for lunch and dinner for, well, let’s just say a long time! I went from 220 down to 190 in a matter of months. I still eat soup at least twice a week. In a nutshell, it’s good for you and good for the soul. Soup rules!

Here’s my story and recipe.

This soup was invented during a time when my wife and I were separated for a few months. I wanted to lose weight and cut back on costs but not die from starvation, so I had to learn how to cook. Man cannot live off beer and peanut-butter crackers alone. To me, if it’s worth looking at, it’s worth eating. So in an attempt to be as creative as I could without burning down the kitchen, I made “The Starving Artist Soup.” It’s easy, it’s quick, and it looks good, too. What you will need are …

2 (10-ounce) cans Campbell’s Beef Vegetable Soup

1 pound hamburger meat (ground sirloin)

Brown the hamburger meat in a pot and drain the grease (the second step is optional, depending on how hungry you are). Add the 2 cans of soup to the hamburger, then add 2 cans of water. Let it cook for 2 minutes on high heat, then bring it down to a simmer.

It makes about four bowls, so you can eat two that night and have leftovers the next night for dinner. It does taste better the second day; I’m not sure why. I lived on this stuff for four months. I lost twenty pounds, paid my expenses, and survived. My wife, after discovering that I hadn’t died without her, came back. That’s my story and recipe. Thanks for reading it.

10
TO STIMULATE AN APPETITE

ONCE UPON A TIME, that magnificent “Monarch of the Kitchen,” Antonin Carême—chef to Talleyrand, Tsar Alexander I, George IV, and Baron de Rothschild—stipulated that soup “must be the agent provocateur of a good dinner.” Nineteenth-century French gastronome and lawyer Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de la Reynière agreed, opining that “soup is to dinner what the portico or the peristyle is to an edifice. That is to say, not only is it the first part, but it should be conceived in such a way as to give an exact idea of the feast, very nearly as the overture to an opera should announce the quality of the whole work.”

In other words, when you’re in the business of stimulating appetites, you are not going to be tossing chunks of pure vegetable into fat-free water or broth and calling it a day. You are, rather, orchestrating exquisite creations out of precious ingredients that are designed to excite the eye, the nose, and the palate.

In today’s largely overweight society, you don’t hear a lot of call for this kind of appetite teasing. And yet that call is there: for those who suffer from anorexia or bulimia; those who have lost weight after medical procedures like chemotherapy; elderly people suffering appetite loss, who need to be coaxed back to strength—not to mention athletes who are trying to make weight. In all these cases, what could be better than an elegant and very thin potation that delights with delicate beauty and taste, that sharpens the appetite with a little sharpness of its own, or that teases the tongue with layers of flavor in a concentrated cream?

Each of the following recipes is set for four servings—say, for that intimate dinner party you’ve been thinking about hosting. But each can easily be doubled for an even bigger splash, or halved for dîner à deux.

THE KINDEST COURSE

Soup is cuisine’s kindest course. It breathes reassurance; it steams consolation; after a weary day it promotes sociability … there is nothing like a bowl of hot soup, its wisp of aromatic steam making the nostrils quiver with anticipation.

—CHEF LOUIS P. DEGOUY, The Soup Book, 1949

CRAB TALES

• John Russell describes crab in his 1460 Boke of Nurture as “a slutt to kerve and a wrawd wight” (a perverse creature).

• Norman Douglas describes its hold over Italians when he noted “Beelzebub himself could never keep a Capri fisherman out of a sea-cave if there was half a franc’s worth of crabs inside it.”

• Poet T. S. Eliot plays it against type when he has his timid J. Alfred Prufrock declare, “I should have been/a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

In fact, the crab is a crustacean that, as a general rule, will eat anything it runs across, and likes nothing better than to fight and procreate. So much for Eliot’s image of a repressed creature.

CREAMY CRAB AND COGNAC SOUP

Serves 4

A TOTALLY DECADENT start to some heavenly meal. You might even want to double the recipe and serve it as the second course.

4 tablespoons (½ stick) butter

3 tablespoons all-purpose flour

4 cups milk

2 tablespoons grated onion

2 teaspoons concentrated vegetable or chicken base, or crushed

bouillon cubes

2 teaspoons chopped fresh parsley

1 teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon ground white pepper

¼ teaspoon grated nutmeg

½ pound backfin crab meat, with any shells removed

1 tablespoon Cognac

Tiny pinches of grated nutmeg, for garnish

TO PREPARE

Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

1. Melt the butter in a large saucepan over medium-low heat. Whisk in the flour and cook, stirring constantly, for 3 minutes. Gradually whisk in the milk. Add the onion, stock base or bouillon cubes, parsley, salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Raise the heat to high and bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to low and simmer, uncovered, until the soup begins to thicken, stirring occasionally, about 10 minutes.

2. Add the crab meat, stirring gently to keep the lumps from breaking apart, and simmer until the soup is creamy and the crab is heated through, 10 to 15 minutes.

TO SERVE

Adjust the seasonings, stir in the Cognac, and ladle the soup immediately into elegant cups. Lightly pinch a bit of nutmeg into each portion.

CRABBY DELIGHTS

Besides being tasty, crab meat is considered an aphrodisiac, possibly because its own history shows it to be eminently successful in the amatory arts. Having evolved during the Jurassic period, along with all those dinosaurs, the crab not only survived the period but multiplied into some 4,500 different species. Some scuttle sideways; some swim; some walk on land.

The ancients, though, set it in the skies: the Cancer constellation. Who put it there? First the Babylonians, who just noted it. Then the Greeks, who lifted it to stardom, giving it a bit role in Hercules’ ninth labor, when he fights and defeats the nine-headed Hydra. Here’s the story: Hera, queen of the gods and eternal hater of this illegitimate son of hubby Zeus, sent a Giant Crab out of the Lerna swamp to pinch Hercules’ toes and distract him from the task at hand. Didn’t faze him. Hercules smooshed that crab flat with his foot, without even a courtesy glance. Hera felt bad about the Crab’s quick end and, to make up for it, gave it immortality by placing it in the heavens as the Cancer constellation. Or so Ptolemy’s Almagest in the second century A.D. says. But modern astronomers generally think that, because it’s such a dim and poorly defined constellation, ancient astrologers fudged—just made the whole story up so they could round out the heavenly map using the Hercules myth to score the twelves signs of the Zodiac.

TRUTH IN LAST RITES

An Irish nobleman, on his deathbed, summoned his heir to his bedside and told him he had a secret to communicate that might prove some compensation for the dilapidated condition of the family property. It was that crab sauce is better than lobster sauce.

—ABRAHAM HAYWARD, THE ART OF DINING, 1852

STRAWBERRY BALSAMICO SOUP

Serves 4

THE EXCEPTION THAT proves the rule: practically noncaloric, but just the thing for provoking an appetite. This marvelous cold fruit soup was brought to my attention by Lisa Gitelson of New York City. She says it best: “Give it a try on a hot summer’s night, don’t tell your guests what’s in it, and they will fall in love.” Serve cold in small cups as a tantalizing first course. For larger portions, double the recipe and serve in elegant flat soup plates.

STRAWBERRIES

This member of the rose family is not a true berry at all, since it carries its tiny seeds on the outside of its flesh instead of within its tissue—and it’s old, very old. So old that it’s native to both the Old and New Worlds, meaning it had already evolved, like the walnut, when these continents were attached during Earth’s early history. Its English name probably derives from the way it grows—originally called strewberry because of the way it’s “strewn” over the ground; its Latin genus, Fragaria, is from its heady fragrance.

Strawberries didn’t taste all that great in their wild state, though Romans—those omnivores—were said to relish them. Cultivation began in the fourteenth century in Europe and almost immediately captured the imagination of artistic monks, when the French king Charles V had some 12,000 strawberry plants set out in his Royal Gardens in 1386. It was a short artistic walk in the monastery for the strawberry to ramble from being a decorative element in religious paintings to becoming a rosy symbol for the Virgin Mary herself.

Strawberry lusciousness got a big upgrade in the seventeenth century, when the New World Fragaria virginiana was brought into the mix to create the modern strawberry. Of this New World varietal—a favorite of Native Americans that was first catalogued in Massachusetts in 1621—one colonist in Maryland wrote, “We cannot set down a foot but we tread on strawberries.”

3 cups halved strawberries

¾ cup sugar

4 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

½ teaspoon finely grated orange zest

¼ teaspoon finely grated lemon zest

1 tablespoon Grand Marnier liqueur or orange juice

3 cups plain yogurt

GARNISH

1 cup halved strawberries

¼ cup sugar

1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

TO PREPARE

1. Three hours ahead, make the garnish first by tossing the halved strawberries with the sugar and balsamic vinegar. Let the berries macerate for at least 2 hours at room temperature or in the fridge.

2. Also 3 hours ahead, puree the halved strawberries for the soup with the sugar, balsamic vinegar, zests, and Grand Marnier. Make sure the sugar has completely dissolved, and let it sit for a few minutes if it hasn’t. Whip the yogurt in a separate bowl, then stir it into the puree until the soup is smooth. Chill well, at least 2 hours.

TO SERVE

Ladle the soup into small cups and top with the macerated strawberries. Drizzle a few teaspoonfuls of the strawberry juice left from the garnish over each portion in a dramatic pattern.

NOT PREJUDICE, BUT GOOD SENSE

We may say of angling as Dr. Boteler said of strawberries: “Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did.”

—SIR IZAAK WALTON, THE COMPLEAT ANGLER, 1653

FRANCE
TARRAGON JELLIED CONSOMMÉ

CONSOMMÉ À L’ESSENCE D’ESTRAGON EN GELÉE

TARRAGON, FROM THE STEPPES OF CENTRAL ASIA

No, really. Fines herbes and haute cuisine notwithstanding, this baby started life in Siberia and didn’t make it to Europe over ancient trade routes until medieval times—a sad thing for ancient Greeks and Romans. Its name is a corruption of the French estragon, or “little dragon,” in turn a corruption of the Arabic tarkhun. Perhaps its dragonish name derived from its reputation for curing the bites and stings of reptiles, venomous insects, and mad dogs, but if you saw its tortuous, coiled roots you might also see the resemblance to depictions of the deadly firebreathing “worm” that battled Saint George.

Tarragon was finally imported to England in the fifteenth century, but grown exclusively in the Royal Gardens. A hundred years later it found its way into English kitchens as a culinary herb, but it wasn’t introduced to the New World until the nineteenth century.

Serves 4

ELEGANT AND BRACING, perhaps particularly on a hot summer day. All the steps can be done ahead so that final assembly takes only a minute. This is a favorite of the English ballerina Anya Linden, formerly of the Royal Ballet, who substitutes spoonfuls of Beluga caviar for the shrimp.

5 cups rich Chicken Stock, preferably homemade and clarified; if you make it with chicken feet, it will be naturally gelatinous and you can forgo the gelatin and water below

1 tablespoon unflavored gelatin (usually sold in 1-tablespoon envelopes)

¼ cup cold water

4 teaspoons minced fresh tarragon or 1 teaspoon dried, crumbled, and hydrated in a little warm water for 15 minutes

1 teaspoon seafood seasoning (such as Old Bay)

¼ pound raw, unpeeled shrimp

Lettuce leaves (Bibb or other butterhead lettuce is nice)

GARNISH

Fresh parsley

1 large lemon

TO PREPARE

NOTE: Start the soup at least 5 hours in advance to let it turn to jelly in the refrigerator.

Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list and, if you are not starting with gelatinous, homemade stock, dissolve the gelatin in the cold water for 10 minutes.

TO COOK

1. Bring the stock to a boil in a large saucepan over mediumhigh heat. Reduce the heat to low and simmer for 5 minutes. Add the tarragon and the dissolved gelatin, if using, mixing well. Remove from the heat and let cool to room temperature, uncovered. Cover and refrigerate for at least 4 hours.

2. Bring about 4 cups of water and the seafood seasoning to a boil over high heat, then add the shrimp and boil them in their shells for 5 minutes. Drain and cool, remove their shells and devein their backs, then chop them into bite-size pieces. Store in the refrigerator until you are ready to assemble the soup.

3. Wash the lettuce and tear it into pieces that will fit into your serving cups. Store in the refrigerator in paper towels, to crisp.

4. Prepare the garnishes: chop the parsley, slice four thin rounds from the lemon, and cut a wedge from the remainder for squeezing.

TO SERVE

Line elegant cups—ideally crystal or glass so you can see the sparkling jelly—with the lettuce. Gently stir the jellied soup, then ladle it into the cups. Sprinkle each portion with the shrimp, parsley, and a squeeze of lemon juice, then slide a paper-thin lemon round down into the jelly.

SOUP WISDOM FROM THE “KING OF CHEFS AND CHEF OF KINGS”

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, early twentieth-century French chef who served as Chef de Cuisine in the Franco-Prussian War, then went on to revolutionize the professional kitchen at The Savoy and other great hotels. It was Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II who told Escoffier, “I am the Emperor of Germany, but you are the emperor of chefs.”

MEXICO
AVOCADOLICIOUS SOUP

SOPA DE AGUACATE

AVOCADOS

Known as “alligator pears” for their shape and reptilian skin, and as “poor man’s butter” for their creaminess, avocados are most colorfully known as the fruit of the “testicle tree.” It’s no mystery why. Fully fruited, these ovulate gems hang down from the trees in twos—and have a longstanding reputation as aphrodisiacs. Their very name in Aztec, ahuacatl, means “testicle.”

Avocados are native to Central America and can be traced back to the fifth century B.C.E. in Mexico and Guatemala, cultivated by both Aztecs and Mayans. In 1519, the Spanish cartographer Martin Fernandez de Encisco, returning from an exploration on the northern coast of South America, pronounced them “marvelous of flavor, so good and pleasing to the palate that it is a marvelous thing.” U.S. President George Washington, on a visit to Barbados in his youth, reportedly ate the avogato with extreme pleasure.

Serves 4

PIQUANT BUT NOT too piquant, creamy but not creamy thick, and packed with calories, this Mexican soup is gorgeously elegant and brainlessly easy to make, whether you decide to serve it cold or hot. If the former, you’ll make it completely in advance and be done with it; if the latter, be prepared to throw it together at the very last minute because you don’t want the delicate avocado turning bitter on you if it’s cooked too long. Needless to say, don’t even think about trying to reheat it.

4 cups (1 quart) Vegetable or Chicken Stock

1 cup heavy cream

1 chile pepper, as hot as you dare (from banana to habanero)

1 garlic clove

2 avocados, peeled and pitted

Salt and white pepper to taste

GARNISH

Minced fresh cilantro

Crisp tortilla chips or fresh tortillas fried in lard or oil

TO PREPARE

NOTE: If you are making the cold version, start at least 3 hours ahead so the soup has time to chill properly.

Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

1. Heat the stock and cream over medium-high heat in a large saucepan, then reduce the heat to low and keep at a simmer.

2. Either in advance for the cold soup or at the last minute for the hot soup, puree the chile pepper and garlic in a blender, then toss in the avocados. Gradually add the hot stock mixture and blend until smooth. Season with salt and pepper, remembering to oversea-son slightly for a cold soup.

TO SERVE

Either serve the hot soup immediately in elegant bowls with the cilantro topping and tortilla chips on the side, or cool slightly and refrigerate to make a cold soup that you will serve later, also with the cilantro and chips.

CINEMATIC AVOCADOS

In arguably one of the most “B” movies ever made, Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death (1989), Colonel Mattel (Paul Ross) warns: “Avocados are vital to this nation’s security interests. With the communists already in control of Nicaragua and Guatemala and El Salvador rife with revolution, California is the last secure supply of avocados in the free world. We’re on the verge of a major avocado gap!”

SPAIN
CHILLED “PUREED SALAD”

ANDALUSIAN GAZPACHO

Serves 4

I WAS PLEASED to get this recipe from José Luis Vivas, a native of Seville currently living in Brussels and working as a conference interpreter; José is a gifted polyglot, hot-air balloon crewman, and connoisseur. The following recipe, his personal version, is both authentic and wonderful. Mr. Vivas says, “Usually you make the quantities very large. This is because we usually make a large batch of this ‘base cream’ and thin it with water to taste, as you can either eat it from a dish like a pureed salad or, as we very often like to do in our hot summers, drink it in a glass.” If you want a smoother texture you can peel the tomatoes and remove the seeds from them and from the cucumbers.

NOTE: Start the soup at least 3 hours in advance so it has time to chill properly. If you don’t have time to chill it properly, just stir some ice cubes into it before serving.

2 slices crusty white bread

2 pounds ripe or canned tomatoes

1 pound cucumber, peeled and coarsely chopped

1 large green bell pepper, seeded and chopped

1 red bell pepper, seeded and chopped (optional for stronger color)

2 large garlic cloves

½ cup olive oil

¼ cup sherry vinegar

2 teaspoons sea salt

GARNISH

Chopped tomato, onion, cucumber, green pepper, hard-boiled egg, and Spanish dried ham

Fresh spearmint leaves

TO PREPARE

1. Soak the bread in plenty of water. Prep the remaining ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

2. Puree all the fruits in a blender (and, yes, they are all fruits, not vegetables), saving the garlic for last. Add the soaked bread, barely drained, the oil, vinegar, and salt and blend again. Refrigerate until very cold.

3. Prepare the bowls of garnishes.

TO SERVE

Ladle the soup into large bowls, dropping a spearmint leaf into each. When served “formally,” gazpacho is presented with an array of garnishes in separate dishes. Pass the garnish bowls for people to serve themselves.

ALICE B. TOKLAS ON GAZPACHO

After the first ineffable gazpacho was served to us [Alice and her longtime lover Gertrude Stein] in Malaga and an entirely different but equally exquisite one was presented in Seville the recipes for them had unquestionably become of greater importance than Grecos and Zurbarans, than cathedrals and museums. Surely the calle de las Sierpes, the liveliest, most seductive of streets, would produce the cook-book that would answer the burning consuming question of how to prepare a gazpacho Cook-books without number, exactly eleven, were offered for inspections but not a gazpacho in any index. Oh, said the clerk, gazpachos are only eaten in Spain by peasants and Americans.

—ALICE B. TOKLAS, in her ALICE B. TOKLAS COOKBOOK, written in the 1920s but not published until 1954

UNITED STATES
ICED POTATO AND LEEK SOUP

VICHYSSOISE

TALES OF VICHYSSOISE

In film director Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, valet Alfred (Michael Gough) serves vichyssoise to Batman (Michael Keaton) while he’s hard at work in front of his computer. Batman’s reaction? He immediately complains that the soup is cold.

My personal fave memory of this soup, though, is from childhood. My family had driven from the iciness of Philadelphia to the tropics of Florida for the Christmas holiday, and we were staying at a small, elegant inn right on a corner of Miami Beach’s sweeping sands. We’d smuggled fireworks into our rooms and planned to ring in the New Year by illegally blasting them off the beach, deep into the ocean. First a late dinner, when Mom ordered … a cold soup? Never heard of such a thing. She spooned it up with an expression of pure delight, giving us each our very first tiny taste of vichyssoise. Then we all ran out to the beach to fire off our rockets.

Serves 4

THIS ELEGANT SOUP needs no describing—it’s a miracle of smooth tastiness, not to mention a classic chef joke, with its creator Louis Diat turning the rough and simple French “homemaker’s potato soup” (bonne femme) into such an ooh-la-la dish.

2 tablespoons butter

3 large leeks, white parts only, washed well and thinly sliced

3 cups Chicken Stock

2 medium potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced

1 teaspoon salt

1 cup milk

¼ teaspoon very finely ground white pepper

1 cup heavy cream

Finely sliced fresh chives, for garnish

TO PREPARE

NOTE: Make the soup the day before so it has time to chill properly.

Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

1. Melt the butter in a large saucepan over low heat, then stir in the leeks and sauté at a very low temperature, stirring occasionally, until they are golden, about 10 minutes.

2. Add the stock, potatoes, and salt. Bring to a simmer over medium-high heat, then cover, reduce the heat to low, and simmer for 40 minutes. Puree, then press the soup through a sieve to get a very fine texture.

3. Return the soup to the saucepan, add the milk and pepper, and bring to a simmer over low heat. Remove from the heat, whisk in the cream, adjust for seasoning (cold soups should be slightly overseasoned), and chill overnight.

TO SERVE

Ladle the soup into small cups—nested glass cups with shaved ice in the bottom would be nice—and sprinkle with chives.

VICHYSSOISE, REVOLUTIONARY SOUP

Pardon, mesdames et messieurs, but I must tell you the unlikely story behind this so-called American soup. Brilliant French chef Louis Diat—who created creme vichyssoise glacée in New York City of all places—ate hot potato soup for breakfast every day of his childhood in the tiny village of Bourbonnais Montmarault. Oh, how he loved it. In fact, the first dish he ever cooked on his own, at the age of eight, was leek and potato soup.

By 1900, Diat had apprenticed in Moulins, then was off to Paris to learn the regal craft of haute cuisine, and he practiced these arts at the Ritz Hotels in Paris and London. But then a revolution occurred! César Ritz guillotined the old regime of fantastically elaborate dishes and extravagant feasts. He sent Chef Diat to New York to raise the revolutionary standard of exquisite flavor, texture, and simple excellence at the spanking new Ritz-Carlton. Death to exotic affectation! And so, ultimately, vichyssoise was born. Diat says, “I remembered how maman used to cool our breakfast soup, on a warm morning, by adding cold milk to it. A cup of cream, an extra straining, and a sprinkle of chives, et voila, I had my new soup. I named my version of maman’s soup after Vichy, the famous spa located not twenty miles from our home, as a tribute to the fine cooking of the region.”

11
TO STRENGTHEN A CONVALESCENT

Mrs. Goldberg refuses to believe that her husband is dead. She sits by his gurney in the mortuary and continues to force-feed him chicken soup. The doctor comes by and asks her what she thinks she’s doing. “It may not help,” she says, “but it couldn’t hurt.”

ONCE UPON A TIME, I lay in a small bed in a darkened room. Groggy. Hot and sweaty. Coughing. Then, footsteps on the stairs. The door opens a crack. Mom.

And not just Mom: Mom with a tray that’s set with a napkin, a silver spoon, a plate of buttered toast points, and a small porcelain bowl of chicken-rice soup.

I whimper. She blots my forehead with a cool cloth. I sniffle. She gives me a kiss, sits me up, plumps up the pillows. Sets the tray on my lap. Suddenly I’m hungry.

How much sweeter could life be than this? I’m so happy to have the memory. It was the early 1950s on Hilspach Street in Philadelphia, city of brotherly love. My older sister was off at school; my brother not yet born. Dad was putting in long hours at the mill and longer ones at night school, still catching up from a youth stolen by B-29 missions in World War II. And I had a young, beautiful mother who brought me chicken soup on a tray when I was ailing.

I bet you have a memory like this, too, even if the details are a bit different. Think sick; think soup. Universally.

And there are good reasons for it.

CHICKEN SOUP TESTIMONIAL

In her hilarious Love and Knishes, Sara Kasdan says, “So it shouldn’t happen, but it does. Your friend is sick. What can you do? I’ll tell you: A good plate of chicken soup has cured more ills than penicillin. Chicken soup has a double-barreled action. The broth flows through the veins like plasma, bringing color to the cheeks; the lokchen (egg noodles) fill up the stomach so is no room left for viruses. And if you’ll put in a carrot and a piece parsley, you got vitamin content, too.”

BROTHS MADE FROM chickens and other creatures were prescribed as remedies for ills as far back as the second century A.D. by the Greek physician Galen, and his teachings (with those of the earlier Hippocrates) were carried forward by word of mouth for a thousand years by local docs. Also, starting in the ninth century, Arab physicians began translating and using these old texts in their communities. Al-Dakhwar in his Damascus clinic, for example, was reported by a student to specifically prescribe chicken soup to a feverish patient.

It was in 1190, though, that the brilliant Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, serving as physician to Saladin’s court in Cairo, wrote a scientific treatise on asthma for his royal patient, forty-year-old Prince al-Afdal, in which he advised “the soup of fat hens is an effective remedy in this disease.” Maimonides also collected and codified the old Galen prescriptions in some 1,500 aphorisms that included Galen’s advice to use chicken soup to treat leprosy, migraine, constipation, “black humours,” and chronic fevers.

Fast forward nearly a thousand more years and we’ve finally figured out, more or less, why and how chicken soup is good for respiratory ailments. In 1978, pulmonary specialist Marvin Sackner, of the Mt. Sinai Medical Center, published his study that demonstrated chicken broth specifically promotes the flow of air and mucous in nasal passages and clears up congestion better than control liquids of hot and cold water.

In the 1980s, Dr. Irwin Ziment, of UCLA School of Medicine, identified cysteine as an amino acid released in cooking a chicken that actively thins the mucous in the lungs, and he demonstrated increased efficacy when chiles, garlic, and spices are added to chicken soup as they loosen phlegm and act as expectorants.

Then, in October 2000, Dr. Stephen Rennard, of the Nebraska Medical Center, published his study on the ability of Jewish chicken soup with matzo balls (a family recipe from Lithuania) to inhibit neutrophil chemotaxis—that is, could it stop the inflammation associated with colds? Emphatically yes, it turns out. Colds happen when viruses infect the mucosa of the upper respiratory tract, provoking the release of white cells (neutrophils), which in turn rush into the tissue and kick up piles of mucous in your lungs and stuffy head. Enter chicken soup, which chemically stops those neutrophils in their tracks without reducing the body’s ability to fight the infection.

Tired of all the talk about mucous? Chicken soup has other benefits, too. All that liquid, for example, washing those pesky viruses down to the stomach, to be destroyed by its powerful digestive acids, not to mention all that liquid preventing dehydration—both of these noted with approval by the American Academy of Family Physicians in 2003. Then, too, there are the intangibles of warm, aromatic comfort food administered by a loving hand. And what about the goodness and power of all the other ingredients in soup?

Eileen Behan, in Cooking for the Unwell, notes that clear broth soups (like “beef tea” and chicken bouillon) may settle an upset stomach, but patients need protein, vitamins, and calories to actually get well. That means adding eggs, bits of meat, flu-fighting garlic, starches, and vegetables to the soup.

The following soups come from many different traditions and cultures, but all are designed to make you feel better and get better. I’ve made the portions very small, on the grounds that these soups are so often custom-made for one (with the obvious exception of Jewish “penicillin,” of which you can never have enough). But they’re awfully good soups in their own right, so if you like them, feel free to double or triple the recipes and serve them for meals or dinner parties. One last note: I regret that I haven’t included Chinese soups—famously medicinal. Alas, they are too specialized: instead of being sovereign remedies, they are customized to address specific imbalances in the body. And I certainly wouldn’t want you eating a yin soup if you had a yang problem.

“RECEIPT TO MAKE SOUP: FOR THE USE OF DEAN SWIFT”

—ALEXANDER POPE, eighteenth-century English poet, renowned for his “well barbered” satires

NOTE: This soup was prepared to hasten Pope’s own recovery from a near fatal accident, and he versified the recipe to recommend it to his friend Jonathan Swift, recently returned to Ireland. It’s full of puns and wordplay, of course: “what’s join’d to a place” is celery; King William III was killed when his horse, Sorrell, stumbled; thyme, of course, “never stands still;” and the meaning of “bed where children are bred” is parsley, but I don’t know why.

ARMENIA
YOGURT-RICE SOUP

PRINZOV ABOUR

Serves 1 to 2

THIS SOUP IS an excellent reflection of Armenian culture, which was forged in Asia Minor, a crossroads of trade routes between the Caspian and Black seas and consequently a battleground over the ages for Assyrians, Medes, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Turks, Russians—you name it. It was in this small spot of the world that cherries and apricots originated—and Armenians developed a cuisine heavily based on those fruits and also on dairy products, meat, grains, butter, and spices. Prinzov abour is rich, yet light; soft on the palate; and highly stimulating to the appetite with its sour-minty tang.

RIDDLE ME THIS

QUESTION: What am I?
“He who lacks it, seeks it. He who has it, mistreats it.”

2 cups Beef Stock

¼ cup raw long-grain rice, washed

1 small onion, finely chopped

1 tablespoon butter

1 tablespoon minced fresh mint leaves or ½ teaspoon dried, crumbled between your palms

1 tablespoon minced fresh parsley

1 to 2 cups plain yogurt, depending on how thick you like the soup

1 small egg, beaten

Salt to taste

Finely minced fresh parsley and mint, for garnish

TO PREPARE

Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

1. Bring the stock to a boil in a large saucepan over high heat, pour in the rice, then reduce the heat to low and simmer, covered, about 20 minutes, until the rice is tender.

2. While the rice is cooking, sauté the onion in the butter in a small skillet over low heat, stirring often, until golden brown. Remove from the heat, stir in the mint and parsley, and scrape into the soup when the rice is cooked.

3. In a separate bowl, beat the yogurt until smooth, then beat the egg into it. Whisk some hot soup into the yogurt, then whisk the yogurt mixture back into the simmering soup and stir until the soup is heated through. Don’t let the soup boil.

TO SERVE

Ladle the soup into bowls and sprinkle with minced parsley and mint before racing it to your patient.

YAB-TA-ÎL-NÊ-NÂ, OR
“THE MINT VENDOR”
(A POPULAR FOLK SONG)

Take me home to my own
     people,
And a kiss I will allow you,
And bestow upon you riches,
And a bunch of mint, sweet
     scented.
There’s the lad who sells the
     mint leaves.
How I love those leaves
     sweet scented.

If you take me to my mother,
On the lips a kiss I’ll offer,
Treasures rare, too, I will give
     you,
And a bunch of mint, O
     sheikh Ahmad.
There’s the lad who sells the
     mint leaves.
How I love those leaves
     sweet scented.

ENGLAND AND FRANCE
BEEF TEA

ROBERT E. LEE’S LAST SOUP

This great American general and commander-in-chief of the Confederate Armies retained during his lifetime the habit of eating his main meal at 3 P.M.—“the old-fashioned hour,” as he called it—and always began it with soup. This could be Mrs. Randolph’s oyster soup, turkey soup, or his favorite tomato-vegetable bouillon with sherry. On his deathbed, however, he supped beef tea: “My dear Genl,” Mrs. Lee wrote on October 10, 1870, to Francis H. Smith, superintendent of Virginia Military Institute, “the Drs. think it would be well for Genl Lee to have some beef tea at once and as I cannot get it at the market before night I send to beg a small piece [of beef].” Alas, General Smith’s offering had little effect on the Genl’s heart: “Robert … always welcomes me with a pressure of the hand,” said Mary Lee as she sat behind him in her rocking chair, and two days later he died.

—From ANNE CARTER ZIMMER’S THE ROBERT E. LEE FAMILY COOKING AND HOUSEKEEPING BOOK, 1997

Serves 1

THEY’RE A HORRIBLE PAIN to make, but these pure essences pack a huge strengthening punch (for Chinese Gee tong, a similar essence, but of chicken). The English version is brown and opaque, tasting like the drippings of a Christmas prime rib that’s been carved—and that I used to fight my brother and sister for shamelessly, dipping into those drippings with small pieces of buttered bread, elbows sharp and territorial over the carving board. The French version is rosy and clear, half the volume of the English version with twice the meat; of course it takes your breath away with its pure intensity. After drinking either, I feel like Pippi Longstocking, Paul Bunyan, and Supergirl, all balled up into one. My grandmother used to make it the English way (unfortunately administering a mustard plaster to my chest at the same time), but now I think the sophisticated French version is superior. Might have something to do with that mustard plaster, though.

ENGLISH BEEF TEA

½ pound boneless round steak, cut 1 inch thick and trimmed completely of fat

Salt to taste

TO PREPARE

Prep the meat as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

1. Broil the steak 2 minutes per side. Then, right in the broiling pan, cut the steak into 1-inch squares and put the squares into a pint-size glass canning jar. Be sure to scrape up the bottom of the pan with one of the squares and get every scrap of goodness into the jar.

2. Pour cold water over the meat to cover, screw on the top, then put the jar into a saucepan of cold water (you can put a brick on the top to keep it steady). The point here is not to cook, but to steep the meat. Turn the heat to low and let the goodness leach out of the meat slowly, over the next 3 to 4 hours.

TO SERVE

Pour off the beef tea, discarding the meat hunks, salt it slightly, and serve warm, preferably in a beautiful cup on a tray with silver spoons and linen napkins.

L’ESSENCE DE BOEUF

1 pound boneless round steak, partially frozen, then carefully trimmed of fat and chopped by hand or in a food processor

1 small onion, finely sliced

A few drops of lemon juice

A few drops of Cognac

Salt to taste

TO PREPARE

1. Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

2. Mix the chopped meat and onion and place in a quart-size glass canning jar.

TO COOK

1. Screw the top on the jar tightly, place in a large soup pot filled with barely simmering water that reaches to the top of the meat inside the jar (put a brick on the top to keep the jar steady), and simmer for 3 to 4 hours, replacing water in the pot as needed to keep the level to the top of the meat.

2. Strain the “essence” carefully—ideally through several layers of moistened cheesecloth—then stir in the lemon, Cognac, and salt.

TO SERVE

Prepare a tray with a lace placemat, a flower in a bud vase, and l’essence in a delicate cup to be carefully spooned into the mouth of your invalid.

“THE SENTIMENTAL BLOKE”

—C. J. DENNIS (1876–1938), Australian writer known as the “Laureate of the Larrikin”

EGYPT
FAVA BEAN SOUP

FUL NABED

ANCIENT FAVA BEANS

Favas originated in ancient Egypt but early spread throughout the Mediterranean and into China. In fact, it was that ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras who forbade his followers to eat them because, according to legend, they were said to contain the souls of the dead. More likely, Pythagoras discerned the connection between eating undercooked fava beans and the anemic blood disorder now called favism. Traces of the fava’s cultivation have been found in Bronze Age sites in Switzerland and in Iron Age sites in England. Epigrammatist Martial opined about them, “If pale beans bubble for you in a red earthenware pot, you can often decline the dinners of sumptuous hosts.”

Serves 2 to 3

PLAIN AND DELICATE in flavor, this simple and nutritious version of the classic Egyptian soup is routinely prescribed for the sick. The familiar garnish of lemon and parsley used here seems to invite the patient to step back into a normal diet. Fava (or broad) beans take a long time to soak, meaning you’ve got to plan for when your sickie is ready to be crammed full of protein, but long soaking results in a blandly comforting soup that’s made pretty quickly in the end. If you can’t find the dried white skinless fava beans, look for canned whole ones, which are relatively easy to skin, or substitute chickpeas.

1 cup dried white skinless fava beans

1 garlic clove

3 cups water

1 tablespoon olive oil

Pinch of ground cumin

Salt and white pepper to taste

GARNISH

1 tablespoon minced fresh parsley

Lemon juice

TO PREPARE

1. Two days ahead, place the beans in a bowl with plenty of water to cover to soak. You may change the water throughout the soaking period to discharge those indigestible complex sugars that have such an impact on human digestive systems.

2. Prep the remaining ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

1. Drain the soaked beans and put them in a large saucepan with the garlic and water. Bring to a boil over high heat, then reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer for at least 1 hour, until the beans are very very tender and literally disintegrating to form a soup. (Depending on the beans, you might need to cook the beans another full hour, adding additional water—don’t worry, you can’t overcook them.) Mash with a fork to get a nice soupy consistency, adding water as necessary to thin the soup to your liking.

2. Whisk in the olive oil and cumin, then season with salt and pepper. Let simmer a few more minutes to blend the flavors.

TO SERVE

Ladle the soup into bowls and garnish with the minced parsley and squeezings of lemon juice. Depending on the taste and health of your sick one, you can serve the soup with more lemon slices on the side and toasted pita bread.

SILENCE OF THE FAVAS

It was Hannibal Lecter in the film The Silence of the Lambs, of course, who claimed to have eaten the liver of a census taker “with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”

FRANCE
CHICKEN NOODLE SOUP

SAVOYARDE SOUPE DE FIDES

Serves 2

THIS SOUP SPECIALLY marked by farm people for the sick in the snowy Alps of France is a real beauty. It’s delicate, aromatic, digestible, and filled with goodness—just the thing to pique a lagging appetite.

MUST BE SOMETHING ABOUT OPERA

Opera composer Gioacchino Antonio Rossini doted on the Italian version of this soup, cappelleti in brodo, which he was said to gulp down at a tremendous rate, as if he feared someone might steal it from him—while Guiseppe Verdi made a variation he called la squisita minestra (“delicious soup”) that he liked to serve to guests, a chicken broth with fried potato dumplings.

3 cups rich Chicken Stock

1 garlic clove, pressed

½ cup broken-up fine soup noodles

¼ cup finely chopped fresh greens or herbs or, even better, peeled fresh asparagus, cut thinly on the diagonal and with tips whole

Salt and white pepper to taste

Pinch of minced fresh parsley, for garnish

TO PREPARE

Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

Bring the broth to a boil in a large saucepan over medium-high heat with the pressed garlic and cook for a minute. Toss in the noodles and cook, uncovered, until they are al dente. Add the asparagus, if using; partially cover and cook for a minute or two. If you are using herbs or greens, add them just as the noodles are done and remove from the heat.

TO SERVE

Season with the salt and pepper. Ladle the soup into bowls and top each portion with a pinch of parsley.

SOUP ON A FRENCH FARM

Colette’s career began with soup. Many things do, in France—the two chief meals of every day, for instance, in every family; and some things end with it also, as, in many working-class homes, there is nothing else for dinner and supper except just the soup, and a big hunk of bread to dip in it. And, on that, the boys and girls manage to grow up as strong and active and wiry as you please. For there is no more valuable article of food than well-made soup.

Mind, it must be well made. A soup square, melted down in a little hot water or a highly seasoned mess out of a tin have no food value at all, or next to none. Besides, they are very costly, and quite needlessly so: real, homemade soup should cost next to nothing, as all the odds and ends in the house can be used up for it.

—MARIE JACQUES, COLETTE’S BEST RECIPES: A BOOK OF FRENCH COOKERY, 1923

ITALY
“LITTLE RAGS” EGG DROP SOUP

STRACCIATELLA

Serves 1 to 2

LIBERALLY TRANSLATED, stracciatella means “little rags” in Italian—and so describes the classic egg rags that swirl through this comfort soup. (This also explains why stracciatella gelato is chocolate chip—that rag effect again.) While this soup is best known as a Roman specialty, it has many variations throughout southern Italy that have escarole or spinach added to the broth for heft, not to mention for flavor and color contrast. And it is the foundation of Italian wedding soup, which ennobles the “little rags” by combining them with tiny meatballs of veal and sirloin seasoned with nutmeg.

2 cups Chicken Stock

1 egg

2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan cheese

2 tablespoons soft bread crumbs or farina

Salt and white pepper to taste

GARNISH

Additional grated Parmesan

A sprig of fresh basil, parsley, or crossed chives

TO PREPARE

Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

1. Bring the stock to a simmer in a large saucepan over low heat.

2. In a small bowl, beat the egg with a fork and continue beating as you add the cheese and bread crumbs—and finally, ½ cup of the simmering stock.

3. Bring the remaining stock to a near boil over medium heat, then scrape in the egg mixture and whisk it feelingly, even emotionally, with a fork for 3 to 4 minutes straight. When you stop beating, let the soup come just barely to a boil. Its creaminess will then break into plump, lacy custards. Season with salt and pepper.

TO SERVE

Ladle the soup into bowls immediately, sprinkle with extra Parmesan cheese, and top with a single piece of fresh herb. Sit down with it. Breathe it in deeply. Get better.

THE FANTASTICAL GLORY OF PARMESAN CHEESE

Do you know about the district of Bengodi? Where “there was a mountain of grated Parmesan cheese, inhabited by people who did nothing but make macaroni and ravioli, which they cooked in chicken broth and then rolled down through the cheese so that anyone could just pick it up and eat it”?

Giovanni Boccaccio tells us all about it in the third story of the eighth day of storytelling in his Decameron, a collection of one hundred tales told in ten days by seven ladies and three young men who have retired to the country from Florence to escape the Black Death in fourteenth-century Italy.

What’s that? You didn’t know this fabulous Italian cheese went back so far in history? In fact, some believe the origins of grana Parmigiano-Reggiano go back to classical times.

JEWISH
CHICKEN SOUP WITH MATZO BALLS

“PENICILLIN”

Serves 4 to 6

THIS RECIPE WAS sent to me by a gentleman in California who said his Belgian Jewish grandmother, Omi Rosi, was renowned for curing what ails you with this soup: “Guaranteed to make you well.” It’s very similar to the Lithuanian variation tested by Dr. Rennard in his study on chicken soup’s ability to inhibit neutrophil chemotaxis and reduce respiratory inflammations, but even more intense by stewing the chicken in chicken stock. I’ve enlarged the serving portion because, of course, you just can’t have enough Jewish penicillin.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF CHICKEN JOKES

In Fiddler on the Roof, the Broadway show and film based on Sholem Aleichem’s short story, Tevye says, “As the good book says, when a poor man eats a chicken, one of them is sick.” Mendel says, “Where does the good book say that?” Tevye says, “Well, it doesn’t say that exactly, but somewhere there is something about a chicken.”

FOR THE MATZO BALLS

1 cup matzo meal

⅓ cup shortening, schmaltz (rendered chicken fat), or mock schmaltz (simmer 1 diced onion in a cup of light olive oil until the onion browns, then remove the onion and stir in 1 tablespoon chicken bouillon granules. Strain the oil into a jar and refrigerate. Use, when solidified, as needed.)

½ cup water

1 teaspoon salt

Grindings of white pepper

4 eggs

FOR THE SOUP

1 stewing chicken, 4 to 5 pounds, or 4 to 5 pounds chicken parts

4 celery stalks with leaves, chopped

1 bunch parsley roots, peeled and chopped (if available)

2 large onions, chopped

6 carrots, peeled and chopped

4 to 6 parsnips, peeled and chopped

1 celery root, peeled and chopped (if not available, add more celery)

1 cup finely chopped fresh parsley

½ cup finely chopped fresh dill

16 cups (4 quarts) Chicken Stock

Salt and pepper to taste

TO PREPARE

1. Prepare the matzo ball dough. In a small bowl, stir together the matzo meal, shortening, water, salt, pepper, and eggs, and beat for 1 minute, then cover and refrigerate for 1 hour.

2. Prep the remaining ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TROPICAL CHICKEN SOUP

In his curious roman á clef Ravelstein, American author Saul Bellow fulfills his promise to real-life friend Allan Bloom (the brilliant political philosopher who died of AIDS in 1992) to write Bloom’s memoir “warts and all,” transforming Bloom into Abe Ravelstein and himself into Chick. It’s a dark comedy that wickedly ends with Chick making himself the main character. And what does wife Rosamund do when she sees that Chick is seriously ill in St. Martin? She “walked miles through the smoke and fire of curbside grills looking for a Thanksgiving turkey. None was to be found. The skinny local hens seemed to be growing hair, not feathers. At the bottom of a freezer in the market, she found packages of stony drumsticks and wings On this island of yams and coconuts there were no cooking greens. Nevertheless she managed after hours of effort to produce a chicken soup. Out of gratitude I [Chick] tried to make a joke of my failure to get it down—remembering an immigrant mother of my childhood who cried out, ‘My Joey can’t eat an ice-cream cone. He turns his head away from it. If he won’t lick an ice cream, he’s got to be dying!’ ”

HOLLYWOOD CHICKEN SOUP

Hollywood magnate Louis B. Mayer insisted that chicken soup with matzo balls—made from his mother’s recipe—be on the MGM commissary menu every single day. And it has remained on the menu ever since, though when Sony upgraded the old deli to the Rita Hayworth Dining Room in the 1990s, the soup turned into a thin, veggie-studded shadow of itself, with one perfectly round and giant matzo taking up most of the bowl. And speaking of Hollywood, it’s said that when Marilyn Monroe was married to Arthur Miller, she got tired of his mother always serving matzo ball soup. “Gee, Arthur,” she said after the tenth time, “these matzo balls are pretty nice, but isn’t there any other part of the matzo you can eat?”

AMAZING CHICKEN SOUP STORY #1

Hollywood mogul Louis B. Mayer forced child star Judy Garland to slim down at age fourteen on a diet of chicken soup, black coffee, and diet pills. To further kill her appetite, she smoked four packs of cigarettes a day.

TO COOK

1. Put all the ingredients for the soup, except the salt and pepper, into a large soup pot, cover, and bring to a boil over medium heat. Reduce the heat to low and simmer, lightly covered, for 2 hours, until everything is tender and soft. Skim off the foam from time to time, if needed.

2. While the soup is cooking, shape the matzo balls, in the size you prefer, from the refrigerated dough, then return them to the refrigerator until you are ready to cook them.

3. After the soup has cooked for 2 hours, take the chicken out of the pot, cool briefly, and remove all the meat from it, discarding the skin and bones. Cut the meat into bite-size pieces and reserve.

4. Fish out half or so of the cooked vegetables and whirl in a blender, then return to the soup as a thickener. Stir in the chicken pieces. Season with salt and pepper. At this point, you may cool the soup, uncovered, and refrigerate it overnight so the flavors can blend. This also makes it easy to remove the solidified fat before finishing the soup.

5. When you are ready to finalize the soup, skim the fat and bring the soup to a low boil over medium heat. Add the matzo balls, cover, and simmer for 30 minutes.

TO SERVE

Ladle the soup into bowls, evenly distributing the matzo balls, then help your sick ones to the table and watch them come back to life.

KOREA
CHICKEN-RICE “WHITE” SOUP

PAEKSUK

Serves 2 to 3

KOREANS MAKE MANY different kinds of curative soups, with a lot of exotic ingredients: Kyesamt’ang, a chicken soup with fresh ginseng roots and jujube fruits, black rooster soup, dragon and phoenix soup, black mountain goat soup, and mudfish and beef brisket soup. Paeksuk, though, is somewhat less dramatic—a homey and rich chicken and rice congee spiced with ginger and garlic, a little sesame oil, and a good jolt of hot pepper sauce. Traditionally, for this elixir you’d use a broth made from a tough old stewing hen that’s been cooked for hours, but it’s just as good, and very quick, to make it with any chicken stock you have on hand.

2 cups Chicken Stock

1 tablespoon pressed or finely minced garlic

1 teaspoon finely grated fresh ginger

3 tablespoons sweet rice, scrubbed in water and rinsed, or any sticky rice

¼ teaspoon toasted sesame oil

½ teaspoon hot pepper sauce, or to taste

1 small green onion, minced, for garnish

TO PREPARE

Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

Combine the chicken stock, garlic, and ginger in a large saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, add the rice, then reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer until the rice is very tender, about 30 minutes. Thin with water, as needed, to get the consistency you like.

“THE WANDERINGS”

Among rivers and lakes I lay
     sick.
Lying among bamboo groves
     I rested.
Then the King summoned
     me, made me Governor;
I leave for my new post, eight
     hundred leagues away.
O royal favor, imperishable
     grace.
I enter the Yŏnch’u Gate,
     bow toward the South
     Gate,
And find a man holding a
     jade tally.
I change horses at P’yŏnggu
     Station and follow the Yŭ.
Where is Sŏm River? Mount
     Ch’i is here.
O waters of Soyang, whither
     do you flow?
When a lonely subject leaves
     the court,
nothing happens except that
     he gets old.

—CHŎNG CH’ŎL, sixteenth-century
Korean poet, also a musician and
politician who fell in and out of
favor during the reign of King
Sŏnjo, ultimately dying in exile

AMAZING CHICKEN SOUP STORY #2

American football great Joe Montana tells the story of the 1979 Cotton Bowl, when he quarterbacked for Notre Dame. The team was down. The city of Dallas was frozen in an ice storm. Montana was so cold that he was fed hot chicken soup in the locker room to stop from shaking. When he went back in the fourth quarter—Cougars 34, Irish 12—he threw a barrage of touchdown passes to finally defeat those Houston Cougars 35–34.

TO SERVE

Stir in the sesame oil and hot pepper sauce, then ladle the soup into bowls, garnish with the green onion, and serve to your patient at once.

PHILIPPINES
RICE SOUP WITH CHICKEN

ARROZ CALDO AT MANOK

Serves 2

THIS SOUP IS tasty, filling, and delicately flavored. One bite is so soothing, you want another … and another … and suddenly you’re feeling better in spite of those nasty germs.

“SUN SERIES”

Cosmic elixir of Hermit Prince: Noon,
In the bottom of this celadon Fish is fish and rice turns Wine, subtler than salt or Cane, embalmer, where none dies
The small death, sleep except By his darkest win, Night.

—VIRGINIA R. MORENO, twentieth-century Filipino poet

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

2 teaspoons peeled and finely grated fresh ginger

1 garlic clove, pressed or minced

1 small onion, chopped

1 pound boneless chicken breasts, cut into bite-size pieces

1 tablespoon fish sauce (patis, nam pla, or nuoc mam), or more to taste

½ cup sticky (or sweet) rice, scrubbed in water and rinsed

2 cups Chicken Stock

White pepper to taste

Thin diagonal slices of green onion, for garnish

TO PREPARE

Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

TO COOK

1. Heat the oil over medium heat in a large saucepan and sauté the ginger, garlic, and onion for a minute or so. Add the chicken and 1 tablespoon fish sauce, and stir to coat. Reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer for about 3 minutes. Add the rice, stirring to coat, and pour in the stock.

2. Bring the soup to a boil over high heat, then reduce it to low, cover, and simmer for 20 to 30 minutes. The soup should be thick and the rice tender.

3. Remove from the heat and season with more fish sauce and the white pepper.

AMAZING CHICKEN SOUP STORY #3

All American faves: Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio ate it with chickpeas, President Jimmy Carter ate it regularly with noodles in the Oval Office, magician David Copperfield likes to eat it backstage out of a Crock-Pot, and Elvis almost drowned in a bowl of chicken soup.

TO SERVE

Ladle the soup into bowls, garnish with delicate slices of green onion, and rush in to your sick ones.

THAILAND
RICE SOUP

KAO TOM

Serves 2

This EXCELLENT soup is especially nice for invalids and babies, with its soft, digestible rice; a barely coddled, protein-rich egg; tender, ground pork bits; and appetite-stimulating spices. The soup is also traditional in Thailand for breakfast, and with lots of condiments, it serves as a “restitution soup” after a night of partying hard.

2 cups light Chicken Stock

¼ cup ground pork

½ cup cooked rice

1 tablespoon nam pla or other fish sauce

2 eggs, the smallest you can find

GARNISH

2 teaspoons finely minced fresh ginger

2 teaspoons minced fresh cilantro

1 green onion, minced

1 teaspoon golden fried onion flakes (toss dried onion flakes in a hot oil-slicked frying pan)

⅛ to ½ teaspoon red pepper flakes

TO PREPARE

Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list, to include the garnishes, which can be reserved in small heaps on a flat plate.

TO COOK

Bring the stock to a boil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the pork, stirring to break it up. Reduce the heat to a simmer, stir in the rice, and simmer for 2 minutes. Season with the fish sauce.

FISH SAUCE

Having grown up in a small Midwestern town, I was already used to driving an hour, each way, for our family’s supply of nuoc mam. These days, fish sauce (known as nuoc mam in Vietnam and nam pla in Thailand) appears on the short list of popular ingredients, and the heady seasoning is now much easier to find. Chefs in search of umami, that elusive fifth taste that follows sour, salty, bitter, and sweet, admit to stirring a spoonful of the potent sauce into the day’s special, and home cooks store a bottle of fish sauce next to their black bean paste and wasabi powder. For others, though, nuoc mam (literally, “water of salty fish”) is still an intimidating bottle of the essence of fishy-ness.

Traditionally, fishermen toss freshly caught anchovies with sea salt, pack the fish into large wooden vats, and then cover them with woven straw mats. Rocks or logs mounded on the vats weigh down the fish. Left undisturbed for six months to one year, the fish slowly ferment, giving off a clear, amber liquid that will later be drained and bottled.

—THY TRAN, the WASHINGTON POST, January 29, 2003

AMAZING CHICKEN SOUP STORY #4

International faves: Israeli prime minister Golda Meier gave her personal recipe to Dan Cooke, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department, who then passed it on to some 200,000 American television viewers. Yasser Arafat practically lives on chicken soup, preferring it to most other foods. Dominican Republic president Joaquin “The Doctor” Balaguer ate it every night with his sisters and lived to the age of ninty-five.

TO SERVE

1. Bring the soup back to a boil over medium heat and carefully break the eggs into it. When the eggs are poached, transfer each to a bowl, then ladle the soup on top.

2. Garnish each portion with ginger, cilantro, green onion, onion flakes, and as much red pepper as you think your sick chicks can handle. Cover each bowl with a lid, let sit for a minute to let the flavors blend, then serve, reminding your patients to inhale the steam as they unlid the bowl.

TRUE CONFESSIONS: THE SEARCH FOR NOODLE SOUP WITH CHICKEN IN IT

I spent most of my college semester in London battling the British version of the flu. The perpetual cold, damp weather didn’t help much. Nor did my flatmates’ legendary partying, which won my living room the nickname “Club Flat 10.” The labels on over-the-counter cold medicines in the drugstore might as well have been written in Greek. So, during a particularly miserable day, I resorted to calling my mother in New Jersey to ask for advice. “Chicken soup,” was her reply. “Preferably hot and clear.”

It was a simple prescription, but difficult to fill in a country that likes soups creamy. (I hadn’t seen a soup that escaped the blender since I arrived at Heathrow.) I consulted England on $45 a Day, and located a famous kosher restaurant across town. It was clear across London, but I figured there could be no better place to get some nice Jewish (hot, clear) chicken soup, so I headed out.

By the time I traveled an hour on the tube, I was feeling decidedly worse. At least the scene in the restaurant was welcoming. A long, glass deli case filled with knishes, kugels, pickled herring, chopped liver, and other delicacies stretched across the room. Salamis hung from the ceiling over the case. Seated at a small table, I thought, “This is a little piece of home that slid across the Atlantic.” Ah, the Motherland. I smiled at a group of Hassidic men in a nearby booth. They ignored me.

I turned my attention to the menu. To my horror, no chicken soup was listed. I asked the waitress, “Do you have soup?” She replied, “Soup of the day is minestrone.”

Minestrone? My sense of being home away from home was shattered. Miserable, I slurped my mediocre minestrone soup. I coughed and blew my nose loudly, hoping subconsciously that a little Jewish grandmother hiding in the kitchen would take pity on me and come up with some chicken soup. No such luck. The waitress gave me a dirty look and the Hassidic men continued to ignore me. So much for the Motherland.

When I got back to the flat I called my mother again and whined pathetically, “There is no hot, clear chicken soup to be had in London.” “Well, try wonton soup,” she said. “That will work.”

Yes. Wonton soup. I can do that. Chinatown is a mere eight blocks away! I started out in the general direction of Chinatown. By this time, my fever was raging and I was probably borderline delirious. Even though I had made the trip thirty times, I got lost and found myself in a creepy-looking alley. When I turned to retrace my steps I noticed a small, dingy looking restaurant. Ducks and a variety of other critters hung in the grease-stained window. Beside the door was taped a faded menu, and on that menu I spotted “Soup.” I scanned down the list:

Noodle soup

Noodle soup with pork

Noodle soup with prawns

Noodle soup with chicken

Eureka!

Inside, the restaurant was dark, the air heavy with cigarette smoke. A Chinese family sat, talking and eating at a table toward the back. Otherwise the place was empty.

A young women approached, herded me toward a table and slapped down a menu. It barely resembled the one in the window and was missing the all important entry: “Noodle soup with chicken.” I asked the girl if it would be possible to get the noodle soup with chicken. She looked at me blankly. I tried again, “Could I get the noodle soup, with chicken in it?” The girl shook her head in frustration and disappeared.

A few minutes later an older women appeared, clearly the mother. She asked me what I would like. I cleared my very hoarse voice. “I would like noodle soup,” I said, pointing to the appropriate menu item, “with chicken in it.”

Confusion. Blank stares.

“Please, I just want the noodle soup with chicken.”

The women disappeared, and I heard increasingly enthusiastic chatter coming from the back of the room. I was next approached by a small man, clearly the patriarch, who looked about 110 years old. He was flanked by a younger man wearing a messy apron. The old man smiled broadly and asked me what I would like.

I spoke very slowly, “I would like the noodle soup—with chicken in it.”

“Noodle soup with chicken in it?”

“Yes, yes, that’s right! Noodle soup with chicken.”

He smiled again, then turned and yelled at his younger companion in Chinese. The old man tapped me on the shoulder and nodded, then disappeared. The volume of chatter coming from the back of the room continued to rise. I didn’t care. All I could think of was how much I wanted that noodle soup with chicken in it.

It arrived about ten minutes later, escorted by an entourage consisting of the waitress, her mother, the patriarch, a few cousins, and pretty much everyone else in the restaurant. A huge bowl was placed in front of me containing noodle soup with a chicken in it—the whole chicken, feet and all. They had courteously hacked the bird into quadrants with a cleaver. To eat this, I was provided with chopsticks. Then the group gathered around to watch.

I was there, working on that soup, for what seemed like about six hours. I woke the next morning in my flat with no recollection of how I got home but feeling surprisingly better. Absent the delirium, and no matter how much I looked, I never found that restaurant again.

—NINA MROSE, attorney and speechwriter, Washington, D.C.

12
TO WOO A LOVER

ONCE UPON A TIME, there was Love.