Solley - An Exaltation of Soups

To Mother and Dad

T O MY MIND , when you talk about soup, youre talking about so much more than a mostly liquid way of filling your stomach.

Consider the story of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at dinner in Japan with Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki. Mrs. Gandhi was served a clear soup in a dark bowl painted inside with pictures of the bamboo tree. Only a few vegetables and a single pigeon egg were floated in the broth, leaving the bowls design visible. Mr. Suzuki asked her what she thought of the presentation. Instantly Mrs. Gandhi replied: To my eyes, it [the egg] is a full moon shining over a dark forest on a clear night. Prime Minister Suzuki sat up straight, completely amazed at her spontaneous and accurate reply.

I like this story a lot because it captures in one fell swoop all the layers of purpose held in a bowl of soup: its edibility, yes, but also its intrinsic beauty, its identification with specific cultures, its universality, and its resonance on the most basic levels.

After all, what is the broth but salt and waterthe sea, the source of all life? What are the ingredients in the soup but fauna and flora that man, oh so painfully and over millennia, domesticated, tamed, made his own, and sacrificed as food for his own survival? The soup served by Suzuki was quintessentially Japanese, symbolizing that countrys cultural aesthetic and Buddhist values, and at the same time universal, so that it could evoke Mrs. Gandhis intuitive reaction.

Look at a bowl of soup and see the evolution of foods created in remote locations over thousands and thousands of years, made into recipes passed from hand to hand, transported on the backs of Indian, Asian, and Arab traders, Roman soldiers, and European explorers, all the way to your supermarket.

Eat a bowl of soup and savor mouthfuls of human resolve since Neolithic times to bring warmth, health, and richness into the lives of their family members, their tribe, their community, their culture.

Consider a bowl of soup from any culture, and think how it came to reflect that specific people, their times of celebration, their passages of life, their most intimate life experiences.

Thats what An Exaltation of Soups is all about. In these pages are the stories and recipes of both soups and soup traditions that most profoundly connect people all over the world. I began the collection many years ago out of sheer love of food and, yes, sheer love of research, too. An initial batch of interesting soup recipes evolved into a loose-leaf cookbook on top of my refrigerator, and this grew thick with notes and glosses as I stumbled over stories and histories and quotes that illustrated the soups and their ingredients. Over time, this raggy book seemed to take on a life of its own, naturally shaping itself into storied recipes that gave insight into the cultures from which they sprang. And when I translated it in 1997 into an ordered website at www.soupsong.com, the floodgates opened: readers from around the world commented on, corrected, refined, and authenticated my materials. Its been a long, rewarding journey for me, really an exaltation of good food, good friends, warmth, and insightan exaltation of soup. I hope you find in this book the long-lost recipe of the soup your great-great-grandmother used to make to celebrate a family wedding, and I hope you find a wealth of other recipes that will inspire you to share warmth, food, and fellowship with all the people in your life.

AMAZING SOUP

J ERRY N EWMAN , contemporary Canadian poet and novelist

S TONE A GE PEOPLE created soup before they had a pot to cook it in, a bowl to serve it in, or a gourd to drink it from.

In fact, its not completely clear who first stumbled onto the concept of soupanthropologists disagree, depending on their interpretation of existing artifacts. Some say it was one of the Homo sapiens gang, sometime after 80,000 B.C.E. either the Neanderthals or the Cro-Magnons who ultimately did those poor Neanderthals in. Others argue for a later generationNeolithic man, around 10,000 B.C.E.

I kind of like the Neanderthal theory. It was a particularly tough and dangerous world back then. These hunter-gatherers were stuck in the last blast of an Ice Age that killed off much of their food and many species. It was every man for himself as the Neanderthals ran fearfully fromand ran hungrily afterwoolly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, wolves, and other hominids. And yet Neanderthal skeletons have been found in France with teeth worn down below gum leveland deeply crippled skeletons have been found, too. This means that some older or sickly prehistoric men and women were kept alive only through the compassion of their communities and the brilliance of someone who could create hot and soupy food alternatives to incredibly cold indigestible plants and tough meat.

I try to put myself under the toque of that Stone Age Julia Child. I imagine him or her using bark to dip and carry water putting food in the water and noticing it soften or swell marking how plants and berries, meat and marrow chunks would infuse the water with color and flavor. I imagine him or her getting the idea of warming the broth from the warm mothers milk that kept little Neanderthal babies happy.

H ERODOTUS ON S CYTHIANS B OILING S OUP IN A NIMAL S KINS , C IRCA 440 B.C.E.