Soups

THE French, who have a sure instinct about foods, insist that nothing can match a good soup to start the meal. The Chinese, who take second place to none in cookery, go further and often eat two or more soups at a meal. The Scots, too, have a long tradition of soup, but with the increasing rush and complication of modern urban life the custom of eating soup is dying out, a victim of the general movement to simplify meals and reduce the labour in the kitchen.

We believe in gastronomic progress by education and evolution, not by violent revolution, so we will not insist that everyone must at once return to soup at every supper (souper !), though this would contribute much to eating pleasure, good nutrition, and easy control of both calories and fat intake. The majority of soups are low in fats and do a wonderful job of satisfying the appetite with few calories. Soups enable people to reduce calories, or even to starve, with less hunger at the end of the meal than when eating any other ordinary form of food.

The great French chef, A. Escoffier, divides soups into two leading classes, clear soups and thick soups, including purées, cream soups, and the veloutes (which start with a white sauce and meat, poultry, or fish stock to make the veloute base and receive one or another kind of separately prepared purées of meat, poultry, fish, or vegetables). Escoffier relegates ordinary vegetable soups and everything that resembles a dilute stew to "plain household cookery", but that does not bother us. These are the soups that do not merely hint at a meal to come; they are a major part or even the central feature of the meal, plebeian but not therefore less delightful. Escoffier forgets that the use of soups in the modern sense is relatively recent; until a century or so ago a soup was a whole meal, or at least the main part of it.

Soups, plain or elegantly modern, can be superlatively good or dull, but seldom really bad. But many a housewife and ordinary restaurant cook sticks to elementary safety as found in the little tins at every grocer's, and seldom ventures far from that base. With such timidity, or laziness, it becomes an adventure in culinary art to mix tins of two different kinds of soups or to dump a tin of peas into a tin of consommé. And so no one is much interested and no one says, "My, this is good, let's have it again soon."

Lately the possibilities among ready prepared soups have much enlarged. A few dried soups are real improvements, mainly because in the dried form the ingredients retain some individual character - they do not blend their flavours so much. As soon as the public is willing to pay a little more than the accepted price for the stacks of cheap ordinary canned food we have so far got used to, modern technology will make wonderful soups and soup bases available to everyone.

The other happy prospect for the future of soups is in the deep freeze. Freezing is less brutal for soups than canning. Not only is it possible to make quick-frozen soups - which are really good and which you can buy and keep for future use - but the deep freeze makes it both possible and sensible for the small household to prepare and have always at hand the easy makings of really fine soups or even the soups themselves.

Soup Stock And Clear Soups

The beginning of soup-making wisdom is recognition of the fact that, in general, good soups start with a stock; you do not cook up everything together from scratch. The Chinese as well as European cooks have known this for centuries, probably for thousands of years. But the Chinese also produce some excellent soups that use no stock, yet are made in only half an hour (see Dorothy Feng's, The Joy of Chinese Cooking). Canned consommés and bouillons are pallid substitutes for good stocks, but they will do in a pinch and allow easy preparation of soups that far surpass most soups that are completely finished before canning. Plain consommes and some purées can be good in tins, but more complicated soups require contrasts in texture or recently blended (but not "averaged") flavours that cannot survive the canning process and subsequent storage.

For the modern adult we recommend all clear soups because the fat and calorie content is negligible, though they can provide important amounts of water-soluble vitamins, minerals, and some amino acids, the basic constituents of proteins. Bouillon cubes provide extremely little nutriment, however. In the ordinary bouillon cube more than half of the weight is usually plain table salt.

In preparing soup stocks and broths most of the fat of the meat is extracted in the boiling water and rises to the top where it will cling to a piece of paper handkerchief dragged over the surface. Chill the stock or broth when the cooking is finished; the grease hardens and is easily lifted or skimmed off while cold. At this stage the stock may still be cloudy. For two to four quarts of stock, break up two or three egg shells, whip slightly two egg whites with one tablespoonful of water, add to the stock, and stir while bringing it to a boil and continue boiling and stirring for two minutes. Allow to stand quietly cooling for 20 to 30 minutes and strain through double cheesecloth. The result should be crystal clear and practically fat-free.