Some things have changed since I was young. When I was young, I didn’t much like soup. I did like my mom’s creamy tomato, but I suspect it was the saltines I liked best. With chicken and noodle, I liked only the broth. The noodles were too smushy and the chicken bits always dark meat. Were there any other kinds of soup? You can hardly count cream of mushroom as soup. It is merely a casserole ingredient.
If it didn’t come in a red and white can, it wasn’t really soup. Other kinds of soup were just leftovers reinvented; turkey bone soup, ham bone soup, – and what’s with buying special stew meat, anyway? Isn’t stew just another reincarnation of left-overs?
Near the close of my second decade of life, I spent nine months in Germany. Here I encountered oxtail soup. My taste buds couldn’t get past its name. However, at the General Walker Hotel in Berchtesgaden, I became a fan of cream soup-du-jour. The correlation to leftovers continued. I noticed each soup-du-jour was a spruced up offering of the vegetable or entree served the evening previous.
In my thirties, business lunch at Furr’s cafeteria was a favorite activity. There I learned to savor cream of broccoli. As one of my colleagues described it, “I thought I had died and gone to heaven.” During the intermittent lean years that followed, I taught myself to make pretty good cream soups from broccoli stems and milk – cartoned, canned or even powdered. These days, I avoid milk.
Enter the Martha Stewart disciples and my daughter-in-law with fresh, savory meatless soup recipes. Welcome the proliferation of alternate “milks” such as soy, almond, coconut and hemp.
This week, I made soup to share from a recipe! A recipe. Not from a can. Not to stretch the budget. Not from leftovers. It was rich, creamy, savory and satisfying. I spent about $10 gathering the special ingredients and a morning pureeing and assembling them. Will I do it again? Doubtful.
But then, again, one thing that hasn’t changed is the need for savory comfort food on frosty winter nights.
