We revisit soup

I'm coming back to soup making in this entry, because of a very brief, but in many ways, telling, email chat with a friend.

My friend recently had some oral surgery that requires that he take no solids for a while. Over the weekend, Guy and I had a lovely visit with he and his partner. We brought over some ice cream, and some soup I had made: celery root soup. Yesterday, he wrote back marveling at how much flavor there was in the soup.

Well, GEE! I'm serious about that. Never forget to compliment the person who cooks for you. First of all, it's the right thing to do. Second of all, cooks work hard. And don't ever assume that they KNOW their food is good. I can honestly tell you that well over 75% of the time, when I taste something I have cooked, I think "it's ok. Nothing great about it." So, to hear someone else actually say they like something is a real thrill to anyone who cooks. I'd say it's what we live for, but I don't want to speak that rashly. It is certainly one of the things I live for, and I love it anytime someone hands me praise about a dish, especially if it's not a dessert. See, I sort of consider desserts "easy to like." Put some sugar and some butter in front of someone, and it's hard not to like it. But something like soup, which, let's face it, has the appeal of a sixty year old maiden aunt to some people (apologies to sixty year old maiden aunts out there. I hope you know I don't mean anything derogatory, but I know you know about the stereotype), doesn't immediately cry out for praise.

It's easy to make good soup. It's also easier to make BAD soup. There are a few key words to remember: salt. brown. TIME. That third one is the most important one. And I don't necessarily mean a LOT of time, but good soup does take time. And the final word: imagination.

The soup I made was not from a recipe, but out of my head. I'd like to share the process by which I came to it. To start, I had accumulated a bunch of celery roots in the refrigerator. Frequently, when I'm out shopping, I forget what I've got in the fridge. And I wind up buying some more. Celery roots are bulky, and I had five of them sitting on a shelf, blocking me from putting in just about anything else. So I wanted to use them. And we hadn't had celery root soup in a while. So, that was the "core" of the soup.

Soup, made with just the vegetable in question and stock, is not really soup in my view. It's pureed vegetables. Or vegetables cooked in broth. Soup needs to transcend that. It needs a base. Italians call this battuto . I believe the Spanish call it soffrito. There's a word for it in French as well, that I don't remember. But in any event, at its core, it's chopped, "soup vegetables," as my grandmother called them. They can vary, but there's just about always an onion or a leek or something like that in it. Celery is almost always there, and as the soup was celery root, it was certainly there in mine. I'm ambivalent about including carrots. If I do, I don't use a lot of them. Carrots are very sweet. While onions do have more sugar in them than do carrots, it takes longer to get that sugar out, so the issue of a "sweet soup" does not raise its head when you're using only onions. It DOES with carrots. So I work with 2 parts of onion, to 2 parts celery, to one part carrot. I don't include garlic in most of my soup battuti. I will use it with something like mushrooms. You have to develop a little "taste imagination," and I'm going to come back to this later on. Ask yourself: would garlic taste good with this? If the answer is no, then don't put it in the battuto.

Okay, so we had the base. Now, that base is going to be fried. In what? For me, NEVER butter only. Butter is wonderful, but it burns. It burns fast, and unless you are looking for that strong, nutty burned butter flavor in your soup, you should stick to all oil, or oil and butter combined. This time around, I used only oil, but this was a closer call.

Okay. What kind of oil? Again, some taste imagination. I put olive oil and celery root together, and it didn't work. So vegetable oil it was. I cut the vegetables coarsely, and got them into a pot, which I had covered with oil.

Why don't I tell you how much oil? I just did. I don't know how big your pot is. For some pots, three tablespoons is too little. For others, it's too much. Free yourself from measuring spoons boys and girls. Use your eyes. Put enough oil into the pot so that it's covered. Then heat it up at medium heat and add your vegetables. When they begin to sizzle, add a good sized pinch of salt. This may be the most important thing you do for the soup. Now let those veggies cook for a few minutes. If your soup is going to be dark colored, you can let them brown. If not, then when you hear the sound change from the sizzle to the slow crackle, stir them. Now, you're cooking, and you're almost done (I promise).

I've written earlier about how to prep celery root. I had peeled mine already and had them cut into big cubes. How big? The distribution of sizes was not uniform, because I was going to puree this eventually, so it didn't matter. The roots went into the pot, and stirred with the battuto, and then another little bit of salt.

Now, add some stock, or some water. Stock is better. Home made is best. You're sick of hearing me give the reasons why I don't make it, so I won't repeat it. I used it out of a box. Enough to cover the vegetables, plus about two inches. Cover the pot, and let it come to a boil. And then, lower the heat, and let this simmer. It's going to take a while, because celery roots are dense. Other vegetables will take less time. My celery roots took about an hour. How do you know when they're soft enough? Put a knife through them. A sharp one. If there's no resistance, they're ready.

I had planned to puree this soup, so I put it aside to cool down, because pureeing hot soup is one of the most dangerous things you can do , if you use a blender . If you want to use a food mill, as I sometimes do, that's fine. So, too, is an immersion blender. But using a standard blender with hot soup is a mild death wish. You WILL hurt yourself. Trust me on this.

Now, here's where your most important kitchen skill comes into play: your imagination. What makes a good soup become a great soup? Yup, your imagination. What do you think would be good? And that can change. When I was making this soup last week, I was thinking that it was strongly flavored, very herbaceous (from the celery flavor), and could use the "boost" from something smoky or hammy. There was pancetta in the refrigerator, that wonderful, unsmoked Italian bacon. But it needed something too. Putting raw pancetta into the soup would have been a disaster. Slimy, greasy and unpleasant. So I fried it. Now, when you fry a pork product, DON'T fall into the trap that a lot of people do. They think "pork, fatty, doesn't need any fat to cook."

WRONG. It needs SOME . Not a lot, but SOME. The fat in pork is locked up. By the time it renders out, any meat will burn. So put in some fat to help things along. I fried the pancetta slices until they were crisp, which took all of about five minutes. Then I drained them on paper towels, and immediately ate half of them.

So I fried some more. And when they were done, and I was finished berating myself for being such a pig, I crumbled them into small little pieces. A natural, Italian v ersion of that disgusting product "Bacos" (remember those? OH GOD. The things we ate on our way to being food sophisticates). The would, and did soften a bit in the soup, but they retained their "solidity" to give me some mouth feel, and to add some depth and meatiness to the soup. I added them after the soup had cooled and I had pureed it. When it was pureed, it was very thick. I could have served it like that, but when soup is too thick, you will find people have difficulty eating more than a spoon or two of it. Thin it if it seems too thick. How do you tell? LOOK AT IT. If it's too thick to you, it's too thick. If it's fine, it's fine. Cook your soups so that they will be too thick. You can always thin them. It's hard to thicken a thin soup without spoling it. Mine was too thick. I added half and half because I had it, it was white, and the soup was white. Did it HAVE to be half and half? Of course not. Milk would have been fine, so would stock, so would water. I had half and half around, it sounded good, and in it went. You think the same way when you cook. And of course, in went the pancetta bits ("PAICOS????").

And there it was. A soup good enough and honest enough to serve to a good friend.

As I have said, and will say, over and over again, engage your senses in the kitchen. Work with all of them. Remember how you hear the p hrase "you eat with your eyes?" Well, you do. But you also eat with your sense memory, with your heart, and with your imagination. And you should cook with them too.

I know, I know, I keep saying this, but I'll say it again: make some soup.