Soup Nuts
The Season Is Upon Us, Fridge Cleaning, Leftover But Not Forgotten, A Note About Proofreading
Issue #28 is here! I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving, and those who celebrate are enjoying Chanukah. Today is December 1, 2021. How is that possible? We’ve turned off the news to stop hearing about a coronavirus variant no one knows enough about yet to be babbling on and on. We never stopped masking up and being vigilant about who we spend time with, anyway. Instead, I will focus on cooking delicious things and sharing culinary insights with you, dear reader. Be safe. Eat soup. —Mitchell
We have entered soup season. Now that the days are shorter, grayer, and colder, a steaming hot bowl of soup is what appeals. While I realize the category of soup is vast and there are soups appropriate for every season, wintertime is soup time for me.
In Issue #19 I offered a recipe—more a technique, really—for a simple butternut squash soup. What’s key there is that I believe the approach to making most soups should, in fact, tend more toward technique than recipe. The beauty of a pot of soup, beyond its warming deliciousness, is it lets you use up what you’ve got lying around—a constant pursuit of mine, readers will have figured out by now.
I can see my mother hovering over her pots of soup—mushroom barley, cabbage borscht, potato leek, chicken—cigarette in manicured hand, cutting vegetables directly into the pot. She didn’t measure anything and her soups were always delicious. (My siblings and I wondered if a few ashes and some stray rubber bands might be the secret.) Following a recipe closely for soup just feels sort of wrong, like referring to a manual on how to be nice. It oughta just come.
That said, I do occasionally see recipes for soups I want to follow. A few have even made it into my repertoire, like this spicy Carrot, Red Lentil and Sweet Potato Soup flavored with harissa from Food 52. I have more harissa in my cupboard than I will be able to consume in this lifetime—see comment about always looking for ways to use up ingredients, above. As if proof that recipes only get you so far with soup, when I make this one it always requires considerably more water than it calls for to achieve the texture I want. With some regularity I also make this Yeminite Chicken Soup from Tori Avey’s website, the closest I’ve found to an amazing bowl of same I marveled over a few years ago in Tel Aviv. The secret is the hawayej spice mix, which you must make, too. I now keep hawayej in my cupboard. A spoonful added to the cooking water from a pot of beans turns unappetizing “bean water” into a delicious soup all its own. (More on saving bean water below.)
I should note that I married a soup hater. Well, that’s not totally fair. Nate loves matzo ball soup. He also enjoys an occasional, creamy, puréed soup. But mostly he snubs soup the way he snubs other hot liquids or anything with too many textures. They are not his thing. He reminds me that people are allowed to have “food preferences.” Uh huh. Occasionally I thrust a hot, chunky bowl of soup on him, anyway, just to watch him squirm.
This week I did what I periodically do, made a big pot of vegetable soup with all the bits and bobs I had in the fridge. I use a technique first shown to me by a Tuscan chef in the hills outside Florence, who was demonstrating the region’s famous bread soup called Ribolita. I chop the vegetables and sauté them in olive oil (or butter or bacon fat for duck fat) for a long time to develop their flavor. I keep chopping and adding to the pot, sautéing all the while, trying to coax out as much flavor as I can. Everything goes in—onions and their cousins, limp celery stalks with their leaves, pieces of spongy turnip, central stalks of cauliflower, leaves of beet, a few shriveled mushrooms, chopped fine. I add some tomato paste or other umami enrichment, such as miso, dried porcini, or a rind of Parmigiano Reggiano. Then I add all the liquids I’ve been saving—from blanching Chinese gai lan, from cooking beans, the whey from straining yogurt, feta brine. I add a handful of soaked beans, maybe some pearled barley or other grain, and bring it to a boil with some herbs, thyme and bay, and plenty of salt and pepper. I reduce the heat, simmer for 90 minutes or so until everything is tender. And you have a pot of goodness for the week.
I will give you the recipe of the soup I just made, but only because I want you to use it as a framework for your own creations. I defy you to replicate this recipe exactly. Don’t be put off by the long list of ingredients. This is what I wanted to use up. My point is to get you thinking about your next pot of soup whenever you are cooking so you can purchase and save things accordingly.
RECIPE: Clean-the-Fridge Soup
(Makes about 5 quarts, 16 portions)
3 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil, butter, bacon fat, duck fat, vegetable oil, or a combination
½ large Spanish onion, chopped
Kosher salt
1 leek, cleaned and chopped
2 scallions, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
Handful Chinese chives, chopped
2 carrots, peeled and diced
3 wilted stalks celery, with leaves, diced
1 3-inch piece parsnip, peeled and diced
½ turnip, peeled and diced
1 3-inch chunk celeriac, peeled and diced
¼ small head caraflex, green, or other cabbage, thinly sliced
6 shiitake mushroom tops, diced
1 tablespoon tomato paste
Pinch Aleppo or other chili pepper
1 quart bean cooking water
1 quart vegetable cooking water
1 quart yogurt whey, feta brine, or similar
1 quart water
½ cup navy, cannellini, or other beans, soaked for at least 8 hours and drained
¼ cup black pearled barley or other grain (if using wheat or other whole berries of some kind, soak them, as well)
5 sprigs thyme
3 sprigs parsley
1 bay leaf
Freshly ground black pepper
Heat the oil or other fat in a large soup pot over medium high heat. Add the onion, season with a pinch of salt, and sauté until translucent, and add all the other vegetable ingredients to the pot as you chop them. Season with salt and keep sautéing until everything is nicely wilted and some vegetables begin to brown, as long as 15 minutes or more. (Note, if using feta or other brine, pull back on the salt.) Add the tomato paste and chili pepper and cook a few minutes more, stirring, to enliven its flavor. Add the various liquids to top off the pot. Add the beans and barley, if using. Add the herbs and black pepper. Bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to a simmer. Set the cover ajar and cook for 75 to 90 minutes, or until the beans and grains and all the vegetables are tender.
The soup is delicious. I’m eating it as I type. But after a few days you might want to differentiate it a little with a mix-in or two. Some suggestions…
Things I Stir into My Soup Before Serving to Add Variety and Enhance Flavor
A spoonful of pesto
A teaspoon of hawayej
Grated Parmigiano Reggiano
Full-fat Greek yogurt or sour cream
Harissa
Mentsuyu, a Japanese soup condiment
Kishk (Palestinian dried yogurt)
Cooked pasta, such as orzo or ditalini
Cooked rice
Toasted stale bread, which can be rubbed with garlic
You get the point. Be creative.
A Note About Proof Reading
I am ever grateful for my growing list of subscribers. One thing I wanted to point out is that I’m aware that upon receipt of my own newsletter, I inevitably find a typo or two. Usually, I’ve got the wrong word spelled correctly in a caption or bullet. I apologize for this. I read and reread the darn thing a hundred times before I hit “publish.” But somehow as soon as it appears in my inbox, I see something I missed. Sometimes I think it’s autocorrect gremlins, who work more slowly than my eyes move across the line, changing correct words spelled correctly to mistakes after I’ve read it. But I also know that our own eyes play tricks on us. I don’t always have access to a printer between the time the newsletter is written and it is sent, and I find it easier to proofread on paper. Anyway, you should know that I do correct the online files, so you can go back and send yourself a corrected version, if you’d like. Also, I’m happy to receive any corrections you find. One day I hope to have enough subscribers and enough time to hand the issue off to a real proofreader. Many thanks for your patience with me until then.