Courtney Allison - The Soup Club Cookbook: Feed Your Friends, Feed Your Family, Feed Yourself

We declare that soup shall be SHARED .

Why soup? Soup scales up and TRAVELS well.

Soup is economical, basic, and NONDENOMINATIONAL .

Soup Club is A STATE OF BEING , not a monthly meeting.

We are not limited to SPECIAL OCCASION soup for holidays, births, moving, or grief.

The MAGICAL DELIVERY of soup to your door is elemental to Soup Club.

SALT your soup. Embrace crushed red pepper.

A black belt is a white belt who NEVER QUIT . Make your soup.

NEVER APOLOGIZE for your soup.

Make soup with ABANDON .

Remember, its just SOUP .

You will need a bigger pot.

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
TO OUR MOTHERS:

Sarah, Kirsten, Nancy, and Karen;
for all they have given us,
including (but not limited to) soup.

WE GREW UP IN OTHER PLACES and settled in New York City, sacrificing thousands of square feet in personal living space in exchange for diversity and density, great art, cheap manicures, access to truly hot peppers, public transportation, and very old tenements that have bars with killer cocktails.

We are an educator, an ecologist, a filmmaker, a nutritionist, a yogi, a traveler, a feminist, a mother, a runner, a Dane, a Jew, a Yankee, a Christian, a vegetarian, a gardener, and a coffee drinker.

We make sure each others glasses are filled with seltzer or wine, as the case may be. We pick up, hang on to, feed, and hug each others kids with abandon. We try to be honest and kind and sometimes succeed at doing both.

We are four friends who cook and we are Soup Club.

What we do is simple: We take turns cooking big pots of soup, enough to feed our four families. We drop off the soup, along with sides and garnishes, at the homes of our three other club members. This happens once a week, which means that we each cook our big pot of soup once a month. The other three weeks, we are treated to one anothers home cooking. This book is the product of our actual Soup Cluba cooking and eating project we have been engaged in for several years. Now we want to spread the word, and to share recipes for the many meals weve enjoyed.

If you are already in the habit of cooking in quantity, expressly to share food with your friends and family, then the idea of doing so on a regular schedule will resonate. If youre used to cooking on a smaller scale, you might enjoy the wider net you can cast with food, when you know it will be enjoyed in other homes.

This is a cookbook, first and foremost, but it is also a guidebook for starting your own Soup Club: the logistics (there are just a few), the essential tools (ditto), and stories (to caution and inspire).

// PART ONE //

HOW TO
BE A SOUP
CLUB

//

WHO IS IN SOUP CLUB? Anyone who likes soup and wants to play by the rules of Soup Club. Although there are no hard and fast rules for how many people can be in Soup Club, four members is a good start. Everyones turn comes once a month, not too often or too infrequently.

The barrier to entry is low. More important than knife skills is a commitment to cooking at home on schedule and sharing the results. That means that your best frienda wonderful cookwho has a job that takes her out of town for days at a time without notice might not be a great choice for Soup Club (but you can still share soup with her, because youre a food-sharing kind of person). On the other hand, do start a Soup Club with that intriguing co-worker whose homemade lunch always looks lovingly prepared, or your neighbor who waters your plants when youre away and ask them to invite a couple of people theyd like to share food with, too.