Wednesday, October 9

Soup, Beautiful Soup

What's your favorite soup moment?

Maybe it's the Campbell's chicken noodle soup that your mom used to heat up when she thought you were over the worst of the flu, with its inimitable salt-water flavor and those slightly slimy noodles.

Or how about the tomato soup that so often sidles up to any grilled-cheese sandwich? (American cheese only, please.) Perhaps you remember a hearty beef-barley soup, so warming in the winter. Or a chilly gazpacho, so refreshing in the summer.

No matter how you dish it out, soup is an important component of our diet, even though lots of it gets relegated to first-course or light-lunch status.

It has been that way for thousands of years – millenia, even. Since before the spoon was even invented, in fact. Medieval folk used to sip broth out of a communal bowl that was passed around the table. If they were lucky enough to have meat or vegetables in their broth, diners just reached in with their hands to pull their rightful chunks out. (To be fair, some mannerly guests did spear their meat on their knives and eat it that way. What manners.)

Soup is present in the very earliest treatises on American cookery, and it is reported that seventeenth-century French explorers wrote tales of the popcorn soup that the Iroquois made. Legend has it that the Philadelphia favorite pepper pot soup was invented when the Continental Army was suffering through a Pennsylvania winter. General Washington asked his cook to make something warming and hearty for the troops, and the cook used the tripe and peppercorns he had on hand to do exactly that. I must be honest in saying that tripe doesn't do much for me, but hey, I've never been a Revolutionary War soldier, either.

More specialty soups came into being in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, with a heavy emphasis on regional ingredients. For instance, turtle soup originated with the original Cajuns, the French Acadians that settled southern Louisiana. The soup is still popular in New Orleans today, where it is prepared with or without cream according to where you are. (It always contains a healthy shot of sherry, as far as I can tell.) According to local lore, the turtle meat is a great aphrodisiac, but no one I know can confirm that personally.

Portuguese and Italian fishermen along the San Fransisco coast are credited with creating cioppino, the Bay Area's answer to bouillabaisse. Back in the early days of this century, those fishermen would take whatever fish and shellfish was left from the day's catch, the scraps that wouldn't make it to market, and cook them with a garlicky tomato base. To look at some of today's cioppino recipes, brimming with Dungeness crab, jumbo shrimp, and other pricey ingredients, you would never know that the recipe was invented to use up leftovers! It is still a delight to eat, no matter what you use in it.

Soups today run the gamut from those old classics to cream soups made without cream and chowders made without fish or corn. Chefs and home cooks are reinterpreting old favorites. You love lentil soup? Then try the "Green Lentil Potage with Country Ham Ravioli, Field Mushrooms and Braised Vegetables" that you can currently get at Charlie Palmer's Aureole restaurant, in New York City. Prefer cream of mushroom? What you want to try is chef Rocco DiSpirito's "Bouillon of Forest Mushrooms with Aged Oloroso Sherry."

Or, maybe, you just want to stay home and avoid menus that read like grocery lists.

I thought about what I could say about chili in this article, and came to the conclusion that it deserves a whole piece of its own (I am from the Lone Star State, after all). So I will save that for another day, and share instead the recipe for black bean soup that is to the right of your screen. You may not believe that a recipe with four ingredients (and several possible levels of garnish) could be worthwhile, but it is. This recipe is fast, reasonably healthful depending what you put on it, and it tastes like it's been simmering all day. It's perfect for a cold weeknight in the dog days of winter, or if you just can't make it to Aureole tonight.