In a Williamsburg dive bar well after midnight, you ask a friend visiting from Philadelphia what she’s cooking recently. She cooks four times a week, and earlier this summer when Luke made pork tenderloin with a honey glaze, she closed her eyes and picked out the ingredients. You had never cooked with fennel before, and she knew it at a bite.
Before she left for New York, this friend went through her fridge on Friday afternoon. She spotted a leftover Thanksgiving turkey and produce that would go bad over when she left for the weekend, so she made a soup.
“Soup is easy,” she said. “You just sautée onions, throw in the vegetables and whatever else you want, add broth, and let it simmer.”
You don’t know how to let her know you spent the entire week making soups and tried making stock. Twice. Before this week, you never made a soup, rarely sought soups out. Some Campbell’s cans have traveled to two or three apartments in case of a tomato or chicken noodle emergency. No urgent cravings arrived, and the soups stayed in tact, a pantry good for the zombie apocalypse.
You don’t know where you’ve been, because the Internet is obsessed with soup. Soup feels borderline prehistoric, existing in the bones of humanity for centuries. From cauldrons to Le Crueset, people have boiled and stewed whatever they can for a pleasant mode of survival.
For you, soup fell outside the safe and somewhat unhealthy comfort area of an Italian/American flavor profiles and ingredients, so you’ve overlooked it for more cheese and more tomatoes. (A pizza soup, which you’re sure exists somewhere on the same Internet corners hailing soup as godly, would probably reformed you years earlier.)
Cooking is an unexpected awakening. Waking up to the joy of soup is just one piece of it.
You’re alert to things that have always existed in front of your eyes, to the items you never purchased on any grocery run in your life. Tofu refrigerated by apricots, a netted bag of pearl onions. You cook eggs with leftover Gruyere, you consume all the produce in your fridge without throwing out the rotten elements, you stick dying parsley in a reused mayo jar and it returns to life overnight. There’s a difference, you notice, between the jalapeños and the white onions at the supermarkets on 17th Street and 13th Street. Both stores have produce that looks like it survived a fight, bruised and shy.
You almost cancel plans when you step out of the subway on Friday morning into the Union Square farmer’s market. When you lived two avenues away, you saw this as the place where your roommate loved to buy flowers. Now your eyes explode when you look at the bright carrots, the tables with green herbs and leeks and fennels’ leaves sitting in one large pile, the flour-dusted bread crusts. There are flowers and cider donuts, and you could spend forever standing next to these things, and you get it.
For the first time in a month or two, you go to two restaurant dinners—one really good, one really mediocre spot for other people’s first dates. You scan the menus to study the ingredient pairs and backtrack how the food on your plate might have been transformed in the kitchen from the rare boring elements. A heavy meatball in tomato sauce, remniscent of any Italian restaurant, and fried calamari feel familiar but doable. Breading, frying, cooking. You can see yourself reconstructing it in your head.
Wenwen in Greenpoint explodes your brain with a fried tofu. There are jammy, soy-sauce marinated eggs in rice, an ice cream sprinkled with cilantro stems, and a shot roulette of baijou and tequila liquors. The chef’s invisible hand leaves the diners with no idea how the raw materials arrived in their fun, final form: crispy, sweet, soft, salty.
You’re noticing little beauties in each meal. When you come home late after a birthday party, you microwave one of your soups and toast sourdough with bread. You sit in the light of the Christmas tree after midnight while your audiobook plays, and you never realized that this is, scientifically, 1000% better than any pizza, reheated or ordered, after a night out. The open-eyed absorption of anything now that you are awake to how the things you’re learning have always been everywhere, all around you—makes you fall in love with soup.
Baked Potato Soup
Luke suggests a baked potato soup when you request soup requests. This soup freckled with chives is as familiar as a sitcom living room set. The American veins of cream, butter, starch, bacon bits. With your lack of soup enthusiasm, you’ve never had it before, but you feel like you and this soup have already met.
When you go to the grocery store, you’re a little bit looser than you should be. There’s a stiff list of needs on your phone, of course, but you’re substituting where you think it could work with no explanation.
You have a zoom interview in 45 minutes, but you run into the grocery store. You find an unsliced sourdough, the right angle of its pillowy inside visible through the plastic and tempting enough to go first in your basket. The recipe calls for russet potatoes, but you grab yellow Yukons. There’s something advertised as “loose carrot,” and it’s big enough to knock Bugs Bunny on his ass. In the basket. The recipe requests whole chicken legs, and you get thighs instead. Cooking calls for improvisation, but you wonder if mixing and matching willy-nilly when you don’t know better is going to have an impact down the line.
You’ll have to find out.
That night, you cook for hours. You cook the bacon until it’s flushed red and crisp, then boil the potatoes for another thirty minutes, then mash them before everything is added to the soup. It is easy. You recognize that now. But this is your first soup, and you’re following the recipe religiously.
When the soup is done, and you plate it with a broiled cheese toast and cereal bowls with green chives, red bacon bits, and white-yellow stripes of grated cheese, you feel good. This little bit—the moment where it all comes together, maybe a little too late at night, but still warm—is the thing you’re starting to love about cooking.
Gingery Chicken Turmeric Soup
When you watched Sohla make a medieval mac and cheese with 18th century tools a few years ago, you were sold. Her video on basic chicken soups was an early recommendation from a friend when crafting the series, and this recipe is for sick days. Imagining yourself feverish and upright by a stove is a nightmare, but if a sickly person can cook this soup, then you hope your skills will clear the threshold.
Boiling chicken meat of any kind, even for a soup, raises some trust issues. Boiling conjures bland, dry chicken breasts. But you realize you’re new to this world—of cooking, of chicken, of soups—so you follow the recipe.
The potatoes also keep popping into places you would never expect. Baked potato soup? Expected. Ginger turmeric soup? Sure. From your experience, potatoes had a nice texture and some quieter earthy flavors. When you wash the potatoes, it smells pleasantly like dirt. Diced, the cubes add a variety and thickness to a soup or sauce.
It turns out russet potatoes are the potatoes you imagine: brown, spotted, oval. They exist in sacks in cartoons. Russet can be the most versatile potato, amenable to surrounding flavors and textures. Red potatoes are sweeter, Yukons more buttery. Since red potatoes are waxy, they hold their shape more than russet or Yukons, but that makes them better for soups than mashed potatoes.
Naturally, on a whim, you bought red potatoes. At the time, russet felt like a fancy word for red. It’s not.
All of this, you discover now after the soup has gone cold in your fridge. A happy mistake.
This is the soup you make before going out at 9 p.m., blow-drying your hair and applying makeup while it stews, because you’re a girl who does it all!
It’s also the soup you eat again when you come home by yourself in the dream light of string lights and pine needles.
So you would recommend it.
(And for what it’s worth, the chicken thighs are incredibly tender, falling right off the bone at the graze of a fork.)
Red Lentil Soup
By now, you appreciate onions. They are the eldest daughter of produce, always in the flavor foundation but rarely recognized for their work. Their invisible support comes through almost every dish you’ve cooked.
This is a moment, despite the red lentil soup or any of these soups throwing some love on the onion in the title, to say thank you to onions.
This Melissa Clark recipe is easy. Soups, shockingly, are easier with each recipe.
Your cousin Liz emailed you to mention the necessity of an immersion blender during soup week. “The immersion blender lets you put it in hot liquid. You can't do that with a food processor (thus the little explosion in the blender). Check ‘em out!” she writes.
This is amazing advice. Though the 99-cent store on your corner has a great supply of baking tins and cooking tools (hello, new peeler, you’re in love with it), you take the advice and move in the opposite direction.
You cook the soup, let it cool overnight, then you reunite with your enemy, the Hamilton Beach blender.
You and this $6 blender Luke had in college still don’t get along. Fool me once, as the saying goes.
To your surprise, it does its job. Maybe too well. Over three batches, you smooth out your soup. It looks, how does one say, like cat vomit in its current state, but you promise, the flavor is good!
You’ll have it tonight with grilled cheese, and you’ll try to freeze some to hand it off. Soup season meets the season of giving.
Stocks
It’s early in the week, and if this week is about soups, you decide to make your own stock. You have three ziploc gallon bags of frozen turkey odds and ends from Thanksgiving and a smaller two-quart Dutch oven from your mom’s mom after the holiday, and that feels like enough.
In your ideal world, the stocks would be the first thing knocked out of the week. They would be the foundation for the rest of the soups you have to cook, though you play it safe and buy store-bought broth to take some of the pressure off the stock’s success.
You make the first stock on Tuesday alongside the baked potato. Long after the dinner is cleaned up and the dishwasher is running, and you have moved onto stringing lights and pinecone ornaments on your Christmas tree, the stock is still simmering. This turkey’s rich and herbal scent permeates the room, a more meaty version of a holiday candle. Water evaporates below the onions, the flat ends of halves facing out like a small sunset. There is something in your gut that makes this seem delicious, dry, roasted. A small garden in a steel stockpot.
Unlike other things, you can’t taste stock as it’s cooking. The top area where the stock would be the easiest access point for a spoon dip is where the bad excess goes. The fat shows in yellow orbs floating barely visible on the surface or in white froth. You can’t salt stock because you can’t tell if the salt and flavor from the bones is done or if your touch will over-salt it.
Right before you go to bed, you strain the stock. There’s only enough to fill a small Tupperware because all the water (which would be the liquid to your stock) evaporates out. You refrigerate it, and in the morning when you wake up, you open it up to skim the fat from the top. This is when you discover your small stock is 100% gelatin.
You still don’t really know why this happens, but you decide to do another try—this time without the fear that adding water will stir the fat and undo the separation that simmering does.
Today, you’ve been simmering a new set of stock with more turkey bones, celery, onion from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. today. You strained the broth (hello, new mesh sieve from 99-cent store), and you’re going to let it cool to see if this is also just a turkey Jell-O in disguise. The stock makes more than last time, maybe three cups worth instead of two.
If you’re lucky, the stock will be frozen for future soups. If you’re not, there’s plenty of time to keep trying with the right ratios—and plenty of broths and stocks at the grocery store.
A shout out in self taught<3 Cooling the soup is another way to go! I support it. Also, we had a measuring cup that lets you separate the fat from from the good liquid (OXO 4 cups fat separator) and it was super helpful. Actually I'm ordering another one right now because I'm inspired to make some soup, girl. This was awesome.