If soup is the broth of life, soup proverbs are the words to live by!

I came upon a proverb the other day, particularly apt: "too many recipes spoil the soup."

And it reminded me of another, "too many cooks spoil the broth." And then another came to mind; you know, the one that says "the more chefs, the better the soup."

I started digging and I found pages of words to live by from every corner of the world. Nothing is more basic nourishment than soup, and nothing nourishes the expression of basic truths like soup metaphors, so it seems! In the following proverbs, soup becomes a vehicle to drive home, often with emotional intensity, at other times with wry detachment, lessons learned from collective experience. These are some of my favorites:

Drink a glass of wine after your soup and you steal a ruble from the doctor. (Russian)
Of soup and love, the first is best. (English, Spanish, Portuguese, etc...)
Between the hand and mouth, the soup is spilt. (Italian and others)
Beauty does not season soup. (Polish and Russian)
You can't sup soup with a fork. (German, Irish, etc.)

Often you'll find the same sentiment, but the expression is culturally specific:
Troubles are easier to take with soup than without. (Yiddish)
Headaches need soup. (Sicilian)

And then you come across the proverbs so arch you can't but smile, even if the sayings come from the bitterest of places:

The less soup, the more spoons. (Malawian)
In your neighbors soup, there's always one fatty morsel. (Persian)
Soup must be hot, insults cold. (Spanish)
If it were ever to rain soup, the poor would only have forks. (Brazilian)
One who has been burned by the soup learns to blow on the yoghurt. (Arab)
Better no soup than no spoon. (German)

A spoon does not know the taste of soup, nor a learned fool the taste of wisdom. (Welsh)
One bee makes no honey, one grain makes no rice soup. (Chinese)
He's not an honest man who burns his mouth on soup and doesn't tell his guest. (Italian)

Last but not least, a few from Nigeria, a land whose Igbo people have proverbs and idioms for everything. Their language, with over a million proverbs and sayings, is one of the richest for linguistic color. Here are a very few, all refer to soup:

• The chicken always blames the soup pot for his tragic circumstances, not the one who slit his throat.
• When the soup is unpalatable, and the yam paste that goes in it is not smooth, then its time to know a man who likes pounded yam.
• If a man makes soup of tears, ask him not for the broth.
• He who eats the egg forgoes the future chicken soup.
• Chickens don't praise their own soup.
• If the soup is sweet, it is money that cooks it.

And with this soul nourishment, Souperlatif is back, after many months of no posting, bemoaning the fact that my food photos just didn't sparkle. I am full of admiration for all the bloggers who take such beautiful photos of their best efforts - I've been working on it, and have been building up a little stock of soups to share. More to come.

Mexican Meatball Soup - from the lighter side of Mexican Cooking

In Southern California the weeks between Winter and Spring aren't very inspiring for fresh vegetable soups. Even the open air markets are looking boring this time of year. But the other day, while shopping at Trader Joe's, I got a tickler as I spied a wonderful little window sill planter with baby fresh herbs - thyme, oregano and mint, appropriately labeled the 'Mexican Meatball Soup' assortment. Now this is a great idea - a very light broth soup, with lots of vegetables which are happily almost always in season, and savory soft meatballs. The herbs are essential for the meatballs and the broth, the chunky vegetables, like carrots, squash, zucchini and potatoes are garnished with cilantro and fresh lime. This soup is definitely both fresh and hearty.

Sopa de Albóndigas, like all good ethnic dishes, is made so many different ways in Mexico - variations reflecting regional ingredients and tastes, family traditions and just plain widely different approaches. I found recipes that had corn and coyote squash with lots of tomatoes and spices, while other recipes used tomato paste and chopped green chiles in a stronger beef broth.

My direct influences were delicious versions I had in local family style Mexican cafes. Really excellent, if you're ever in the area of Half Moon Bay, is the soup on the menu at La Famiglia Mexican, on the Cabrillo Hwy just south of the town. The broth was light but flavorful, the vegetables just right, even if the meatballs were a bit too large. Another favorite is the Vallarta Restaurant in Fillmore, California, where the meatballs are soft and smaller, and again, the soup features an ungreasy light and spicy broth.

I also checked the recipe in Encarnacion's Kitchen, the wonderful historical cookbook documenting Mexican recipes from nineteenth century California. I found that Encarnacion's meatballs were a little too rich - she adds minced green onions, garlic and some chopped up tomatoes, with some lard or butter, more egg and breadcrumbs along with the cornmeal paste. While almost all recipes I came across used oregano in the meatballs, Encarnacion just has parsley, and parsley only for the soup garnish as well. In general, Encarnacion's recipes are less spiced that cooking south of the border. She clearly had already adopted many of the gentler seasoning predilections of the Europeans in her community around San Jose.

And here is the recipe for Sopa de Albondigas or Meatball Soup:

Famine Soup: Alexis Soyer and the Soup Kitchen

In the rich and often fanciful world of food and foodies, Famine Soup hardly sounds like a an inspiration for tonight's dinner. It isn't. But it does provide some food for thought and a window into the political world of food and famine.

The soup kitchen, which thankfully multiplied across America during the Depression Era helping to feed the legions of unemployed and destitute, was actually first introduced as a relief effort in Dublin during the Great Potato Famine of the mid-1840's. After the potato blight ruined three consecutive harvests in Ireland between 1845 and 1847, the British Prime Minister, Robert Peel, introduced the Soup Kitchen Act in January of 1847 which mandated the setup of soup kitchens throughout all the voting districts of Ireland. By the end of the year, there were over 1200 such kitchens operating, serving a bowl of soup for 1 penny.

And the effort did have its celebrity chef participation:
Alexis Soyer, certainly the most fabled chef and restauranteur in England during the middle of the 19th century, was a Frenchman by birth, trained in some of the best establishments in Paris. By the time he was 17, he was already a master chef with 12 assistants! At the ripe age of 21 (in 1831), he came to London, and quickly built a reputation as a flamboyant and gifted chef among the nobles and landed gentry. In 1837, he was recruited by the new Reform Club, which was to be the most elite gentlemens club in all of London, to help design the kitchen and be the chef de cuisine. He had a knack for innovation and introduced countless gadgets and cooking equipment. So, when he heard about the plight of the Irish in the winter of 1847, he asked for a leave of absence from the Reform club and went to Dublin to lend his talents and expertise to the cause. His soup kitchen became a model for all others. It was designed as a state of the art facility, which at its peak, served 5000 or more bowls of soup a day!

His signature dish? Famine Soup - yes, it was actually called that.

Soyer is one of my favorite characters in the history of Food. I hope to have more about him in future posts. And there will be more about soup kitchens, too, an important chapter in the history of food, relief and politics of charity.

Celery Root - In Season, and in the Soup

Celery Root or Celeriac...
is a gnarly old thing easily passed up in the veggie display on account of its formidable ugliness and its often relatively steep sticker price. Definitely don't demur - take it home and you'll have enough to transform some of your everyday favorites into elegantly flavored new dishes.

Celery root is nutty and slightly sweet with a hint of celery flavor. The tough outer skin peels with a strong vegetable peeler to reveal a white turnip-like interior. Cooking time is similar to other root vegetables like turnip and sweet potato, though shorter than beets and white potatoes. The French love their celeriac au gratin, in addition to making a rich and creamy potato and celery soup. Northern Europeans make a delicious celery root salad by boiling and slicing the root, then dressing with onions, parsley and a sweet sour sauce.

For American palates, using less goes a long way. So, if you encounter celeriac in a recipe, try halving the amount until you know what you like!

And now that you've bought this thing, here are a few suggestions:

New Mashed Potatoes
Add a diced quarter of a celery root to your usual amount of potatoes. Potatoes take 20 minutes after water boils, so add the celery root 5 minutes into the cooking. Drain, steam, then mash using a hand mixer or ricer with 2 tbspns butter and up to a 1/4 cup milk or half n half until fluffy. Season with a few fresh gratings of nutmeg and server hot.
Wonderful with Swedish meatballs, roast chicken or duck, or perhaps roast beef.

Celery Surprise Roasted Root Vegetables
Half or quarter 4 small red potatoes with skins on, peel and cut a white turnip into 1/8 (slices look like half moons) and large dice half a celery root. Also slice a large carrot into 1 inch rings. Melt a tablespoon of butter with 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Toss vegetables with 4 whole cloves of garlic, with skins on, with the oil/butter mixture, salt, and pepper. Put into a baking dish (higher than wide so flavors mix), and drizzle with juice of 1/2 a lemon. Bake 30 to 45 minutes, until vegetables are slightly crisp on the outside and tender.
Serve with roast chicken.

Soups with just a hint of nutty celeriac
Now you have a quarter of the root left. Just enough for either the Smoky Split Pea Soup posted earlier or, saving best for last, a delicious creamy Potato Veloute. Click on the link for this wonderful luncheon soup, best served only with a light salad of baby lettuces with a delicate lemony raspberry dressing and fresh pepper.

About this Soup Blog!

This blog is brand new. I'm hoping the content steadily increases, and that eventually a team of soupers gathers to keep the content fresh and the excitement rich. For the start of the blog, building content with recipes will be my main focus. Recipes are important, and I feel strongly about how the printed recipe is structured. I often take issue with the standard format in today's books: ingredient lists in order of use, usually with prep instructions imbedded in the list. Instructions follow, but while cooking, the chef is reading back and forth from the top and bottom, gathering and prepping while managing the cooking. A bit of a visual juggle!, and one that puts the energy emphasis on cooking as a series of sequential operations, instead of giving us the time to sharpen our sensory skills so we can actually improve our dishes.

Every once in a while, a cookbook author will exhort the users to first read the whole recipe through to pre-master the cooking event, and lots of magazine articles around the holidays attempt to comfort the daunted hostess with minute by minute stepped programs. But the typical sequence still doesn't allow time to test and sample ingredient choices along the way, and most often the endproduct is artless.

A case in point: the instuctions say, 'saute vegetables 5 to 8 minutes then add broth'. If broth is frozen (like so many of the homemade stocks we love to use), the 5 to 8 minutes doesn't give enough time to thaw, heat and sample, deciding whether, say, to add a little chicken stock or water to the beef!

So, I like to see a printed recipe as a tool to help the chef manage the quality of the finished dish, not necessarily just steps to completing the dish. Preparing a dish successfully is managing the ingredient selection and prep, then devoting all energy to the actual cooking. The printed recipe should clarify and assist this process.

With soups, it's particularly apt to adopt this approach. Soups are made of solids, liquids and garnishes. I always like to start with the liquids. Choose your broths or water, then heat, season and taste so they are ready when you need to add them. Recipes calling for water often benefit from a studded clove and bayleaf, or a bit of celery, onion, peppercorns and bayleaf poached in the water for flavor and fragrance, but then removed before using the water. A few sprigs of parsley and a small sliver of lemon zest can also really sparkle the water for other fish and dellicate vegetable soups, where a stronger vegetable broth just wouldn't do. Vegetables are easy to prep as a group, using separate small bowls to gather different ingredients to be added at the same time. Once done, all the messy skins and shavings can be shoveled together into the pre-compost tin, and the workspace remains clean and orderly. Garnishes, too, have their own process. Beginning early will give you the time to lavish on decorative or time-intensive special touches. Even meats and beans will benefit from separate preparation, and the final combining of flavors is more controlled.

Hope you can look at the recipes here with these ideas in mind. I'd love to hear some feedback from chefs or home cooks who have thoughts or advice on how to structure recipe.