Soup/Stew

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.

The soup-stew, a bowl of spoon-tender meat, beans, and aromatics that partly collapse into the surrounding stock, is one of the suppers I hold dearest. More often taken as lunch, this is food that feeds the soul as much as the belly, enriching, calming, quietly energizing. This is the cooking on which to lavish the cheapest cuts going, the fatty, bony lumps that butchers sell at reduced prices: mostly cuts from the neck and lower legs. Ingredients whose sole purpose is to give body to the liquid in which they cook. A knuckle end of prosciutto would be a sound addition here, if your local deli will sell you one. Most will charge very little. Butchers are an excellent source of ham bones with much meat attached. Failing that, I use a lump of ham, complete with its thick layer of fat.

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.

A damp January morning (2006) and a walk round the vegetable patch reveals only two herbs in reasonable condition: rosemary, which loses some of its potency in winter, and parsley, most of which has collapsed in a dead faint to the ground. I value both enormously, feeling even now that they have an edge on the imported basil and spindly thyme in the markets. Both respond well to earthy winter cooking. Chilled to the bone (I find it’s the damp that gets to me more than the temperature), I come in and use the parsley where it really matters: in a pan of braised artichokes and pork sausage, whose brown depths I freshen up with Italian lemons and, at its side, some crisp and chewy greens.

Hot, clean, and vibrant, a mouth-popping stew for scooping up with soft, warm naan or, if you prefer, rice. Should you want something richer and less spicy, then stir in a carton of yogurt, about 1 cup (250g), at the end and simmer for a further seven or eight minutes.

A lovely, deeply flavored vegetable stew. This is one of those dishes that is all the better for a day in the fridge, during which time the flavors seem to mellow. I have kept it quite spicy but the final seasoning will depend on how hot your chiles are, and you will need to adjust it accordingly. Something to take your time over. I eat it with steamed basmati rice.

Sicily’s cooks make much of the eggplant. They fry it in crisp disks, with mint and vinegar; bake it with tomato sauce and salty caciocavallo cheese; stuff it with anchovies, parsley, and capers; or grill it over charcoal before seasoning with garlic and oregano. Occasionally, they will roll up a thick jam of eggplant in soft disks of dough like a savory strudel, called scaccie, while all the time matching it to the Arab-influenced exotica of their cupboards: anchovies, olives, fennel, mint, pomegranates, currants, and pine nuts. The thin, Turkish eggplant with the bulbous end is the one they prefer, though you could use any shape for their famous caponata, the rich sweet-sour stew braised with celery, golden raisins, vinegar, and bell peppers. I can eat this fragrant, amber slop at any time of year, but somehow I always end up making it when the sun is shining, eating it outside with flat, chewy bread and maybe some grilled sardines flecked with torn mint leaves and lemon. If you make it the day before, its character—salty, sweet, and sour—will have time to settle itself.

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.

If a cauliflower is happiest under a comfort blanket of cream and cheese, we can run with the idea, dropping the cheese and introducing some of the milder, more fragrant spices such as coriander and cardamom into the cream instead. With its toasted cashews and crisp finish of spiced fried onions, this is a mild dish, so I see no reason to soften the blow with steamed rice, preferring instead to eat it with a crunchy salad of Belgian endive and watercress (or some such crisp, hot leaf ), using it to wipe the sauce from my plate.

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.

This rustic soup is laden with beans, vegetables, and cheese. A chunky version of the typically smooth tortilla soup, it doesn’t require any traditional soup stock; the tomato juice and sweet corn cobs make a rich broth full of the fresh, south-of-the-border tastes of summertime. Read about incorporating heirloom beans into dishes like this one on the opposite page.

This sweet and tangy cold soup is one of Lucid Food’s signature dishes. For catered events, we often serve it in shot glasses as an hors d’oeuvre. A guest once suggested we top them off with vodka, and so a wonderful new take on the Bloody Mary was invented. You can make this recipe a day ahead and reseason it just before serving.

The peel of the cucumber gives this soup its vibrant green color. Because it’s so easy to prepare, assemble all the ingredients beforehand so you can blend the soup just minutes before serving; the flavors will be fresh and the color bright. Don’t let it sit for more than 30 minutes or it will lose its luster!