The Soup Recipe You Requested...

Food, but more wet.

Mom’s soup was simple. If it was in the fridge, it was fair game: maybe some cans of stuff, maybe some stuff out of the freezer, cover the whole thing with water, adjust the spices, and it was perfect, every time. Leftover chicken or turkey? Boil it for a bit and take out the bones, well, at least most of them. Bean soup? ‘Add some of that salt pork from the freezer.’ ‘How much?’ ‘Oh, you know, some.’

You start with an onion.

I first made ‘proper soups’ at Gizmo’s, a bar and grill in College Station, Texas. I worked there just after High School for about 7 or 8 months. It was owned and run by a couple of sisters who got tired of cocktailing at other bars and decided to start their own. They were Yankees, as we called them, Northerners misplaced in our Southern Town, and they were also city girls with sensibilities that set them apart from the other folks in Northgate, College Station’s bar district. Case in point, they played and allowed only Jazz music on the stereo (the other bars on the strip played only two kinds of music, yep, that’s right: country and western). They decorated with trellises and fake flowers, unlike their competition, there was not one single oil sign, hunting trophy (or, for that matter, any other creative taxidermy experiments) or even a wooden Indian to be found. It was not exactly fancy; it was, after all, a bar, and there was no shortage of neon lights, ashtrays, paper napkins or casual drunkenness. But it aspired to be a bit more. We had no fryer, no pizza oven and no chargrill; we served sandwiches, from a broiler, bread and dips, even steamed vegetables (!) with cheese sauce, and, of course, we served soup.

Laurie and Marsha were in dire need of stepping away from the bar (at least 12 steps away, one would hope) when I met them, and ran this dive-y little jazz bar as one would expect from a couple of waning moons; it was graceful and sloppy, fun and dangerous, exciting and scary. In the evenings, as a 19 year old and the ‘kid’ in the kitchen, I was a mascot of sorts—brought out and shown off, fed drinks and encouraged to entertain. In the mornings, however, it was all business. Laurie, thanks to a long and steady diet of white wine and menthol cigarettes, was creatively past her peak, but had, while ‘up North’ learned to make soups the old fashioned way. Her recipes were explicit, precise, and ‘from scratch.’ We made broth and chopped vegetables; we layered aromatics and sweat them; we made roux and used wine judiciously (at least for cooking...). We added the broth (or the stock) to the sweated vegetables and/or the translucent onions, brought it to a simmer and then added the roots, followed, in 20 minutes or so, by the softer vegetables, and then, eventually, the greens or the cabbage—with the herbs coming last, just before service. Grains were added according to their cooking times, pasta was added to the pot before service, never to the whole batch. Meat was browned just before adding the aromatics, set aside and later returned to the simmering broth. Salt and pepper were added in bits throughout and adjusted at the end to taste... Once, while waiting for Laurie to teach me how to make a roux to finish a gumbo, she spotted an older biker at the bar who was immediately hauled off of his stool and coerced into the kitchen; ‘Chopper’ was an old Cajun from the Bayou and, while stirring the flour into the oil with a long wooden spoon, he carefully explained to me that a proper roux, when finished, carried the same hue as the skin of a mulatto woman. Why, specifically a woman, I never quite understood, but the image stuck, and I think of it every time I make a roux today.

I came to work one day after a break and found the building empty. My last paycheck never came. At the time, I was, understandably, a little peeved, but in hindsight, those lessons in soup and the image of Chopper the Giant Cajun Biker stirring a proper roux in that tiny kitchen more than covered for the lost wages.

You add the broth.

I wasn’t very poor growing up, but I wasn’t very rich either. We were comfortable, but not flush. Mom says dad always came through in the pinch—the bills got paid, no-one went hungry, but, well, let’s just say that wastefulness was never an option. Food, to me, is never just simple nourishment, nor is it ever just a medium for creative expression. It is both of these things, of course, but it is also always something more. Food is life. And not metaphorically (though it is a rather tidy metaphor) food is, literally, from life, to life, through life, it is the Eucharist, the host and the wine, the body and the blood. We live only through the consumption of life, and some day, when our time comes, we will become food for something else. Food willing. This is a spiritual truth to me. Given this truth, I find it unfathomable that food, good food, is ever wasted—I feel that food, that life, is a gift and one not to be trifled with, it is something that deserves respect and that it should never, ever be wasted.

In stating this I am all but confessing to being something that we cooks call a ‘trash can’ cook. This title is a dart thrown by some who would disparage a style of cooking that creatively redirects what would otherwise be wasted into another use rather than making one of those ‘proper soups’ I learned to make at Gizmo’s. Things like Mom’s ‘end of the week vegetable soup’. Yesterday’s leftover shepherd’s pie as today’s beef chowder, last week’s stir fry as yesterday’s hot and sour soup. Well, frankly, I don’t consider that barb an insult; I will accept that badge of honour and wear it with pride. If a ‘trash can’ cook is someone who doesn’t believe in wastefulness, someone who has a creative spirit, someone who sees life and chooses not to waste it, well, then I am Oscar the Grouch and welcome to the kitchen in my can.

Add the vegetables, meats, and other foods in order of their cooking times.

Soup has always been a peasant food, a meal of thrift. The word ‘Chowder’ comes to us from ‘chaudiere’ the French name for the giant cooking pots in the village squares in coastal France where the fishermen, the working stiffs, were welcomed home with a bubbling stew to which they added the bycatch of the day. Stews, curries, hot pots, pho, every culture has a tradition of using the trimmings creatively to stretch the lifespan of a meal, to use the whole animal, to re-use what would otherwise be lost. Most ‘proper soups’ evolved from these bubbling cauldrons, these products of thrift and ingenuity, these meals that were built not from recipes but rather, from whatever there was to be found. Comforting restoratives. Restore-ants, as it were. It was a concentrated meat broth developed in France that lent its name to the storefronts where it was offered, giving us ‘restaurants’ as we know them today.

Taste and adjust.

I don’t really use a recipe for soup, but I don’t really not use one either. I start by looking around, seeing what is available, what is good, what needs to be used, and then I start with an onion, brown the meats, sweat the aromatics, add the broth, the vegetables and taste and adjust. Just before serving, I add the garnish, the herbs, the pasta... I allow it to simmer, I let the flavours mingle. And I do not waste a single drop.