Clifford A. Wright - The Best Soups in the World

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Copyright 2010 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved

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Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Wright, Clifford A.

The best soups in the world / Clifford A. Wright.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-470-18052-5 (pbk.)

1. Soups. I. Title.

TX757.W73 2009

641.8'13dc222008053454

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Book design by Ralph Fowler / rlf design

For Najwa al-Qattan, scholar, great mom, reluctant cook

Also by Clifford A. Wright

On Cooking

A Mediterranean Feast

Cucina Rapida

Cucina Paradiso

Italian Pure & Simple

Lasagne

Little Foods of the Mediterranean

Mediterranean Vegetables

Real Stew

Grill Italian

Some Like It Hot

Bake until Bubbly

On Politics and History

Facts and Fables: The Arab-Israeli Conflict

After the Palestine-Israel War: Limits to U.S. and Israeli Policy with Khalil Nakhleh

acknowledgments

In the writing of any cookbook, it is the people who actually eat all the test preparations that go into perfecting the recipes who deserve the most thanks. They, after all, are the people who daily offer up their palates and provide crucial feedback, even concerning those not-so-great preparations that do not make it into the book. The others who deserve thanks are the people who provide advice on researching, writing, and editing recipes and on making a final selection that shows balance and breadthespecially important to a book that would offer the best in any category. So, many heart-felt thanks to my agent Angela Miller; my editor Justin Schwartz; my children Ali, Dyala, and Seri Kattan-Wright; to their mother, Najwa al-Qattan; and to my colleagues and friends Martha Rose Shulman, Deborah Madison, Russ Parsons, and Sarah Pillsbury.

introduction

In the dead of winter, rosy cheeks, cold hands, blown snow, and the icy chill are all forgotten the moment you stamp your boots in the mudroom and catch a whiff of a rich, thick, and hearty soup wafting in from the kitchen. Sometimes heaven is being hunched over a bowl of cabbage soup flavored with smoked bacon, kielbasa sausage, sour cream, and paprika, slurping with abandon. And in the summer, when the temperature hits the nineties, when green beans arrive in the market and tomatoes are bursting with ripeness, you make a simple yet delectable soup flavored with garlic, olive oil, celery, and fresh basil, or maybe a cold cucumber, yogurt, and walnut soup, or gazpacho.

Everyone remembers that best French onion soup they ate, with the slightly burnt cheese spilling over the edge of the bowl, or the spicy tang of the hot-and-sour shrimp soup at the neighborhood Thai restaurant. Oh, how you would love to make these soups at home! How hard could it be? Well, not so hard at all, and now you dont even have to look for a recipe. Theyre all here, all the classical, famous, and not-so-famous soups from around the globe. These are the best soups in the world (or should I say, those that could fit in this book). Whatever the season, a bowl of soup is a soul-satisfying experience.

One of my most poignant memories of real food is from a vacation I was on as a ten-year-olda memory that inspired me to write this book. We were in Spain in the summer of 1961. I remember I had the most amazing soup. My parents took us to a wonderful restaurant. I had never been to such a place. It was elegant, or seemed elegant compared to the kind of restaurants we went to back home. The walls were a pale pastel gray, and the starched tablecloths were white. The tables were arranged in banquettes, which to this day I love to sit at. The waiter was better dressed than my dad.

My mother ordered vegetable soup for me. My heart sank because the only vegetable soup I knew was what I considered to be, even at age ten, the ghastly canned version, an unforgiving atrocity committed against what were once real vegetables. But what the waiter brought was something quite different. First of all, it was not red or clear or filled with perfectly diced overcooked vegetables. It was greenish and smootha velout, I later learned. It was served in a very wide white bowl with a broad brim. And it was delicious: the most delicious thing I had ever eaten. I ate it with a funny little spoon that was halfway between a cereal bowl spoon and a baby spoon. It was a soup spoon. I had never eaten soup with a soup spoon.

Nearly fifty years later I finally told my mom about this memory, and she said, as if it had happened yesterday, Oh, that must have been in Zaragoza; it was about ten in the evening and we couldnt find anywhere for you to eat until we finally found a restaurant that was open early. (Anyone who has been to Spain knows how impossibly late Spaniards eat supper.) She couldnt remember the name of the restaurant, but when my father died and I was cleaning out one of his closets I found a large brown envelope with all the hotel receipts from that trip in 1961. The restaurant was down the street from the Hotel Goya in Zaragoza, a hotel that still exists!

Soups are a basic food. They are enriching and satisfying. This book is a treasury of the favorite soups from world cuisines. Many of the recipes require no more than a trip to the supermarket and have great appeal because soups are comfort food. Theyre easy to make, can be an appetizer or a meal in themselves, freeze well, fit into a variety of personal diets, are light or filling (depending), and have a lot of culinary bang for the buckone gets a heck of a lot of flavor out of something so simple. This is one of the reasons that soups have always been the first food of hard times.