An Exaltation of Soups (21 page)
Read An Exaltation of Soups Online
Authors: Patricia Solley
T
ALES OF
V
ICHYSSOISE
In film director Tim Burton’s
Batman Returns
, valet Alfred (Michael Gough) serves
vichyssoise
to Batman (Michael Keaton) while he’s hard at work in front of his computer. Batman’s reaction? He immediately complains that the soup is cold.
My personal fave memory of this soup, though, is from childhood. My family had driven from the iciness of Philadelphia to the tropics of Florida for the Christmas holiday, and we were staying at a small, elegant inn right on a corner of Miami Beach’s sweeping sands. We’d smuggled fireworks into our rooms and planned to ring in the New Year by illegally blasting them off the beach, deep into the ocean. First a late dinner, when Mom ordered … a cold soup? Never heard of such a thing. She spooned it up with an expression of pure delight, giving us each our very first tiny taste of
vichyssoise.
Then we all ran out to the beach to fire off our rockets.
Serves 4
T
HIS ELEGANT SOUP
needs no describing—it’s a miracle of smooth tastiness, not to mention a classic chef joke, with its creator Louis Diat turning the rough and simple French “homemaker’s potato soup”
(bonne femme)
into such an ooh-la-la dish.
2 tablespoons butter
3 large leeks, white parts only, washed well and thinly sliced
3 cups Chicken Stock
2 medium potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
¼ teaspoon very finely ground white pepper
1 cup heavy cream
Finely sliced fresh chives, for garnish
O
P
REPARE
N
OTE
: Make the soup the day before so it has time to chill properly.
Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list.
O
C
OOK
1. Melt the butter in a large saucepan over low heat, then stir in the leeks and sauté at a very low temperature, stirring occasionally, until they are golden, about 10 minutes.
2. Add the stock, potatoes, and salt. Bring to a simmer over medium-high heat, then cover, reduce the heat to low, and simmer for 40 minutes. Puree, then press the soup through a sieve to get a very fine texture.
3. Return the soup to the saucepan, add the milk and pepper, and bring to a simmer over low heat. Remove from the heat, whisk
in the cream, adjust for seasoning (cold soups should be slightly overseasoned), and chill overnight.
O
S
ERVE
Ladle the soup into small cups—nested glass cups with shaved ice in the bottom would be nice—and sprinkle with chives.
V
ICHYSSOISE
, R
EVOLUTIONARY
S
OUP
Pardon, mesdames et messieurs
, but I must tell you the unlikely story behind this so-called American soup. Brilliant French chef Louis Diat—who created
creme vichyssoise glacée
in New York City of all places—ate hot potato soup for breakfast every day of his childhood in the tiny village of Bourbonnais Montmarault. Oh, how he loved it. In fact, the first dish he ever cooked on his own, at the age of eight, was leek and potato soup.
By 1900, Diat had apprenticed in Moulins, then was off to Paris to learn the regal craft of haute cuisine, and he practiced these arts at the Ritz Hotels in Paris and London. But then a revolution occurred! César Ritz guillotined the old regime of fantastically elaborate dishes and extravagant feasts. He sent Chef Diat to New York to raise the revolutionary standard of exquisite flavor, texture, and simple excellence at the spanking new Ritz-Carlton. Death to exotic affectation! And so, ultimately,
vichyssoise
was born. Diat says, “I remembered how
maman
used to cool our breakfast soup, on a warm morning, by adding cold milk to it. A cup of cream, an extra straining, and a sprinkle of chives,
et voila
, I had my new soup. I named my version of
maman’s
soup after Vichy, the famous spa located not twenty miles from our home, as a tribute to the fine cooking of the region.”
T
O
S
TRENGTHEN A
C
ONVALESCENT
Mrs. Goldberg refuses to believe that her husband is dead. She sits by his gurney in the mortuary and continues to force-feed him chicken soup. The doctor comes by and asks her what she thinks she’s doing. “It may not help,” she says, “but it couldn’t hurt.”
O
NCE UPON A TIME
, I lay in a small bed in a darkened room. Groggy. Hot and sweaty. Coughing. Then, footsteps on the stairs. The door opens a crack. Mom.
And not just Mom: Mom with a tray that’s set with a napkin, a silver spoon, a plate of buttered toast points, and a small porcelain bowl of chicken-rice soup.
I whimper. She blots my forehead with a cool cloth. I sniffle. She gives me a kiss, sits me up, plumps up the pillows. Sets the tray on my lap. Suddenly I’m hungry.
How much sweeter could life be than this? I’m so happy to have the memory. It was the early 1950s on Hilspach Street in Philadelphia, city of brotherly love. My older sister was off at school; my brother not yet born. Dad was putting in long hours at the mill and longer ones at night school, still catching up from a youth stolen by B-29 missions in World War II. And I had a young, beautiful mother who brought me chicken soup on a tray when I was ailing.
I bet you have a memory like this, too, even if the details are a bit different. Think sick; think soup. Universally.
And there are good reasons for it.
C
HICKEN
S
OUP
T
ESTIMONIAL
In her hilarious
Love and Knishes
, Sara Kasdan says, “So it shouldn’t happen, but it does. Your friend is sick. What can you do? I’ll tell you: A good plate of chicken soup has cured more ills than penicillin. Chicken soup has a double-barreled action. The broth flows through the veins like plasma, bringing color to the cheeks; the
lokchen
(egg noodles) fill up the stomach so is no room left for viruses. And if you’ll put in a carrot and a piece parsley, you got vitamin content, too.”
B
ROTHS MADE FROM
chickens and other creatures were prescribed as remedies for ills as far back as the second century
A.D.
by the Greek physician Galen, and his teachings (with those of the earlier Hippocrates) were carried forward by word of mouth for a thousand years by local docs. Also, starting in the ninth century, Arab physicians began translating and using these old texts in their communities. Al-Dakhwar in his Damascus clinic, for example, was reported by a student to specifically prescribe chicken soup to a feverish patient.
It was in 1190, though, that the brilliant Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, serving as physician to Saladin’s court in Cairo, wrote a scientific treatise on asthma for his royal patient, forty-year-old Prince al-Afdal, in which he advised “the soup of fat hens is an effective remedy in this disease.” Maimonides also collected and codified the old Galen prescriptions in some 1,500 aphorisms that included Galen’s advice to use chicken soup to treat leprosy, migraine, constipation, “black humours,” and chronic fevers.
Fast forward nearly a thousand more years and we’ve finally figured out, more or less, why and how chicken soup is good for respiratory ailments. In 1978, pulmonary specialist Marvin Sackner, of the Mt. Sinai Medical Center, published his study that demonstrated chicken broth specifically promotes the flow of air and mucous in nasal passages and clears up congestion better than control liquids of hot and cold water.
In the 1980s, Dr. Irwin Ziment, of UCLA School of Medicine, identified cysteine as an amino acid released in cooking a chicken that actively thins the mucous in the lungs, and he demonstrated increased efficacy when chiles, garlic, and spices are added to chicken soup as they loosen phlegm and act as expectorants.
Then, in October 2000, Dr. Stephen Rennard, of the Nebraska
Medical Center, published his study on the ability of Jewish chicken soup with matzo balls (a family recipe from Lithuania) to inhibit neutrophil chemotaxis—that is, could it stop the inflammation associated with colds? Emphatically yes, it turns out. Colds happen when viruses infect the mucosa of the upper respiratory tract, provoking the release of white cells (neutrophils), which in turn rush into the tissue and kick up piles of mucous in your lungs and stuffy head. Enter chicken soup, which chemically stops those neutrophils in their tracks without reducing the body’s ability to fight the infection.
Tired of all the talk about mucous? Chicken soup has other benefits, too. All that liquid, for example, washing those pesky viruses down to the stomach, to be destroyed by its powerful digestive acids, not to mention all that liquid preventing dehydration—both of these noted with approval by the American Academy of Family Physicians in 2003. Then, too, there are the intangibles of warm, aromatic comfort food administered by a loving hand. And what about the goodness and power of all the other ingredients in soup?
Eileen Behan, in
Cooking for the Unwell
, notes that clear broth soups (like “beef tea” and chicken bouillon) may settle an upset stomach, but patients need protein, vitamins, and calories to actually get well. That means adding eggs, bits of meat, flu-fighting garlic, starches, and vegetables to the soup.
The following soups come from many different traditions and cultures, but all are designed to make you feel better and get better. I’ve made the portions very small, on the grounds that these soups are so often custom-made for one (with the obvious exception of Jewish “penicillin,” of which you can never have enough). But they’re awfully good soups in their own right, so if you like them, feel free to double or triple the recipes and serve them for meals or dinner parties. One last note: I regret that I haven’t included Chinese soups—famously medicinal. Alas, they are too specialized: instead of being sovereign remedies, they are customized to address specific imbalances in the body. And I certainly wouldn’t want you eating a yin soup if you had a yang problem.
“R
ECEIPT TO
M
AKE
S
OUP
: F
OR THE
U
SE OF
D
EAN
S
WIFT
”
| Take a knuckle of Veal (You may buy it, or steal), In a few peices cut it, In a Stewing pan put it, Salt, pepper and mace Must season this knuckle, Then what’s join’d to a place, With other Herbs muckle; That which killed King Will, And what never stands still, Some sprigs of that bed Where Children are bred, Which much you will mend, if Both Spinage and Endive, And Lettuce and Beet , | With Marygold meet; Put no water at all; For it maketh things small; Which, lest it should happen, A close cover clap on; Put this pot of Wood’s mettle In a hot boiling kettle, And there let it be, (Mark the Doctrine I teach) About let me see, Thrice as long as you preach. So skimming the fat off, Say Grace, with your hat off O then, with what rapture Will it fill Dean and Chapter! |
—A
LEXANDER
P
OPE
,
eighteenth-century English poet, renowned for his “well barbered” satires
N
OTE
: This soup was prepared to hasten Pope’s own recovery from a near fatal accident, and he versified the recipe to recommend it to his friend Jonathan Swift, recently returned to Ireland. It’s full of puns and wordplay, of course: “what’s join’d to a place” is celery; King William III was killed when his horse, Sorrell, stumbled; thyme, of course, “never stands still;” and the meaning of “bed where children are bred” is parsley, but I don’t know why.