Soup

The first time I included pumpkin in a coconut-scented laksa was for a Bonfire Night supper in 2004 (see The Kitchen Diaries). The soup had to be sensational to make up for our distinct lack of fireworks (I think we wrote our names in the air with sparklers). Rich, sweet-sour, mouth-tinglingly hot, and yet curiously soothing, it had everything you need in a soup for a frosty night. There is much pleasure to be had in the constant tweaking of a recipe to change not its essential character but its details. And so it has been with this soup. I have since gone on to remove the tomatoes or add some shredded greens as the mood and the state of the larder take me. Such improvisations, many made at the last minute, need to be done with care: you don’t want too many flavors going on. Vietnamese soups such as this are traditionally ingredient rich but should never taste confused. By the same token, to simplify it too much would be to lose the soup’s generosity and complexity and therefore its point. The laksa appears complicated at first but in practice it is far from it. Once you understand the basics, the recipe falls into place and becomes something you can fiddle with to suit your own taste. The basic spice paste needs heat (ginger, garlic, tiny bird’s eye chiles); the liquid needs body and sweetness (coconut milk, rich stock); the finish needs sourness and freshness (lime juice, mint, cilantro). The necessary saltiness comes from nam pla and tamari rather than salt itself. These notes in place, you can feel free to include noodles, tomatoes, greens, sweet vegetables, or meat as you wish. What matters is balance.

Midsummer is a time of extraordinary activity in my garden. Every day brings with it a new shoot, a newly opened rose, a froth of lettuce seedlings. At this point I make a soup of the older lettuces and peas, and yet there is no reason why I shouldn’t make it throughout the year with frozen peas and produce-market lettuce.

Dried porcini are expensive, but even a small handful added to a soup will bring with it a wave of smoky, almost beefy notes. A general instruction with parsnip soup is to prevent the vegetables coloring, presumably to keep the soup pale, but I suggest the opposite. You want the parsnips to cook to a gentle golden color before you add the stock; that way the soup will have a deeper flavor and a color reminiscent of heather honey.

The tools for my winter gardening sessions tend to lie on the kitchen floor from one week to the next: the pruning knife, my leather-handled pruning shears, the largest of the two spades, the rake. They serve as a reminder that even though the garden may look crisp and neat from the window, there is still work to be done. It is during these cold, gray-sky days that I sometimes feel as if I live on soup. Roots—fat carrots, artichokes, and woody parsnips— are part of the lineup, along with onions and the occasional potato. I take much pleasure in the way something can be both earthy and velvety at the same time. Rather like my gardening gloves.

One of those soups that doubles as a main course, earthy, filling, and beefy. The soup relies on the onion to add depth and body.

I relish the frugality and bonhomie of a bowl of onion soup. This is slightly richer and thicker than the one in The Kitchen Diaries, possibly for colder weather. I don’t often use flour to thicken a soup but in this case it produces a particularly velvety texture.

Good cooking often comes from simply going with what is around at the time. Ingredients that are in season at the same time tend to go together—in this case, the last of a hat trick of leek soups made with all that is left in the depleted winter vegetable patch.

Onions have always had a slightly awkward relationship with fish. They seem particularly ungainly and rough edged alongside the white varieties or shellfish. Shallots work better, with their milder notes and less significant dose of sugar, but of all the alliums it is the leek that marries most successfully. The white of the leek has an elegance and subtlety that is unlikely to overpower any fish you put it with. In a soup or pie, it dances with the piscine ingredients where an onion would tread on their toes. Chowder is traditionally a hearty bowl of food. The one I make with mussels and bacon is a short step away from the big clam and potato numbers I have eaten in Boston, in that it is somewhat lighter and less creamy, but it is still essentially a big soup for a cool day.

The potato and the leek are happy bedfellows, as anyone who has eaten a good vichysoisse will know. Softer than potato and onion, more graceful than a chowder, warm potato and leek soup has a peaceful, almost soporific quality. A silky, cool-weather soup that somehow manages to taste creamy and rich with only the smallest amount of butter and no cream in it.

Kale is just one possibility for bulking out this supper of pork balls and broth. I use it because I like the fullness of its leaves with the smooth pork balls. You could use any member of the greens family, and particularly Savoy cabbage. The important bit is not to overcook the greens.

I have long made a simple artichoke soup by adding the scrubbed tubers to softened onions, pouring over stock, and then simmering until the artichokes fall apart. I often add a little lemon juice, bay leaves, and sometimes a thumb of ginger. I blitz it in the blender, then stir in lots of chopped parsley. Some might introduce cream at this point but I honestly don’t think it’s necessary. The soup is velvety enough. It has become a staple in this kitchen over the last few winters; its warm nuttiness is always welcome on a steely-skied January day. Late in the winter of 2008, possibly having had one day too many of what Beth Chatto calls “dustbin-lid skies,” I changed the soup’s tone by adding a stirring of bright green spinach. As often happens, it came about by accident—a bowl of creamed spinach left over from a boiled ham lunch—added to the soup just to use it up. The magic in this soup is in the marriage of earthy cold-weather food and a shot of mood-lifting chlorophyll. Spring is obviously stirring.

On the right day, a deep bowl of lentil soup is all the food I need. The homey, almost spare quality satisfies me in a way fancier recipes cannot. The undertones of frugality, poverty even, are avoided by rich seasonings of unsmoked bacon, herbs, and good stock. The backbone of earthiness is given a fresh top note with mint and lemon juice. You can keep your beef Wellington.

Fresh pork hock is not an easy piece of meat to carve. I just do the best I can, cutting the soft meat away in pieces and laying them in a shallow bowl or deep plate. Then ladle the thin, aromatic broth around it.

Long associated with the finale of the Christmas meal, Stilton and celery is a fine combination and there is every reason to turn it into a soup. I’m not sure it matters which blue cheese you use but the saltier types tend to be more interesting here. A good Stilton will work well enough, but something with more punch—say Picos, Roquefort, Stichelton, or Cashel Blue—would get my vote, as would good old Danish Blue. Cream is usually a given with celery soup, but I am not sure you need it.

You could measure my life in bowls of soup. Each New Year’s Day brings a pot of lentil soup (a good-luck symbol throughout much of Europe); pea and mint soup is to celebrate early summer; cabbage soup for colds and crash diets; parsnip soup for frosty weekends; chicken broth to cleanse my soul. You probably don’t want to know about the parsimonious soup-stew I put together from the weekly fridge cleanup. I do believe in the power of soup to restore our spirits and to strengthen and protect us. Steaming, frugal, yet curiously luxurious, soup replaces many a meal in this house. With a good loaf on the bread board and fresh salad in the bowl, I have no shame in serving soup to visitors (only amusement in watching them looking round in vain for a main course). I first came up with the idea of this soup years ago, and have watched it do the rounds, yet it has never made it into any of my own books until now. It has something of the Welsh rarebit about it.

A preserved duck leg from the deli has saved my supper more times than I can count. Cased in its own white fat and crisped up in the oven or in a sauté pan, these “duck confit” are as near as I get to eating ready-made food. One January, arriving home cold and less than 100 percent, I stripped the meat from a couple of duck legs and used it to add protein to an express version of one of those lovingly tended cabbage and bean soups. The result was a slightly chaotic bowlful of food that felt as if it should be eaten from a scrubbed pine table in a French cave house. An extraordinarily heartwarming supper, immensely satisfying. An edible version of the sort of people one refers to as “the salt of the earth.” I am certain no one would have guessed it hadn’t spent the entire afternoon puttering away in a cast-iron pot.

The frugality implied in the words “cabbage soup” appeals to me just as much as the fanciful descriptions of Michelin-starred menus. The words evoke a rich simplicity where nothing unnecessary intrudes. This is indeed a soup of extraordinary solace, gratifying in its purity. The stark fact that this was a meal formed in poverty is there for all to see. Portugal has a cabbage soup, perhaps the best known of all, caldo verde. It is made with couve gallego, a yellow-flowered kale, whose leaves are flatter and less plumelike than the kale we generally buy in the market. The other ingredients are from the pantry, but should include a few slices of chorizo if the soup is to have any authenticity. This soup works with any coarse-textured greens and eminently, I think, with Savoy cabbage.

A good use for the older, tougher specimens. I have made this with those plastic-entombed bunches from the late-night corner market and you would never have known it.

In the 1980s, puréed beets, snipped chives, and swirls of sour cream made a startling chilled soup that became an almost permanent fixture at the café in which I cooked for much of the decade. The most outrageous Schiaparelli pink, it was a picture in its deep white-porcelain tureen. I wish now I had had the nerve to include the finely chopped gherkins whose sweet-sour pickle notes could have lifted the soup from its candy-cane sweetness. One glance at a Russian or Swedish cookbook would have been enough.