Soup, Soup, Beautiful Soup!

"Do you have a kinder, more adaptable friend in the food world than soup? Who soothes you when you are ill? Who refuses to leave you when you are impoverished and stretches its resources to give a hearty sustenance and cheer? Who warms you in the winter and cools you in the summer? Yet who also is capable of doing honor to your richest table and impressing your most demanding guests? Soup does its loyal best, no matter what undignified conditions are imposed upon it. You don't catch steak hanging around when you're poor and sick, do you?"
Miss Manners

This is, perhaps, my favorite quote about soup, which just happens to be one of my favorite things. I like all kinds of soup, and have an impressive collection of recipes and cookbooks that are nothing but soup. There is no cuisine in the world that doesn't have some kind of soup. Soup comes in all temperatures and there is very little that can't be made into some kind of soup. I think the story "Stone Soup", in which the protagonist starts a kettle full of water in the marketplace and throws in a stone to the curiosity of the locals, who in turn bring various and sundry meats and vegetables to add to the pot, exists in practically every culture.

There are many soups that recall fond memories for me. I don't make my grandmother's fish chowder without remembering the summer fishing vacations spent with my parents, my brother and my grandparents at Alexandria Bay, New York, right on the St. Lawrence Seaway. The preferred fish for the chowder was northern pike, which I remember Grandma Jobes patiently de-boning with tweezers while the broth ingredients simmered. The only kinship to true chowders is in the salt pork that is rendered to give the fat to cook the onions in, there being nary a speck of cream or butter involved in the preparation. It was a family tradition, though, to have Grandma's fish chowder for supper at least once on vacation, though. The soup itself is a broth with carrots, onions, celery and potatoes cooked with thyme, salt and pepper, to which the fish is added after the vegetables are simmered to tenderness. The tiny bits of crisped, browned salt pork are sprinkled on the soup at the table and lend a crispy texture that contrasts with the flaky white fish and soft veggies.

While other people stop at the store to pick up cans of Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup when they are sick, I stop to pick up chicken broth and a package of kluski noodles. I have never been too sick to dice onions, celery and carrots to simmer to tenderness in chicken broth with lots of pepper. The noodles go in at the end. I am convinced that this soup, along with a little orange juice and copious amounts of strong, sugary tea, taken at the first sign of a cold or the flu have done more to heal me and keep me on the move than any number of over the counter remedies.

Potato and greens soup, zucchini soup and French onion soup all remind me of my mother, and I never make them without thinking of her and how much I still miss her after ten years. Broccoli cheese soup and taco soup are probably among the things I've kept from all my trips to Weight Watchers, and they remind me of all the things I do right and that I've incorporated into my life on a regular basis.

I am a good cook, and routinely praised for my efforts, but soup is where I really shine. I read cookbooks the way other people read the latest efforts by John Grisham, and it is soup that lets me explore my culinary bounds. I've made soup from around the globe. Armenian red lentil soup, Thai shrimp and coconut milk soup, African peanut soup, French onion soup, Russian and Ukrainian borschts, Japanese miso soup, Vietnamese pho, Spanish gazpacho, Portuguese kale soup, Transylvanian bean and potato soup. Some of the recipes were interesting to make, but not added to my repertoire because they took too much work. Some I adapted. Most, however, reflect the need that people from every culture have had throughout history for food which is simple to prepare and that doesn't need a lot of fussing over because there are other things to do. We didn't invent that situation here in America in the twentieth century. Great-great-great-great grandma had fields to plow and plant, cloth to weave, a household to manage and keep clean, and animals and children to tend, without the aid of modern conveniences like electric or gas ranges, automatic dishwashers, drive-through windows and pizza delivery.

Soup is part of who we are as a species. It was probably one of the first things to cook over that new-fangled fire there in the cave. It sustained us when times got lean and the food had to be stretched to last until spring or the next antelope or buffalo hunt. In fact, it didn't need meat at all if things were really rough. And that is still true today. Give me ten or twenty dollars for groceries, and I guarantee that some kind of soup will be on the menu and it will last all week long.

I do keep canned soup on hand. I admit it. It's there because it's something I won't make or don't have enough interest in to make and eat a whole pot of. It's a quick grab and go kind of lunch. But my preference is to have a container of soup that I made on hand. That's grab and go too.

Can you tell I'm passionate about the virtues of soup? And that I obviously LIKE pease porridge in the pot nine days old?