Broccoli Rising and Souped Up

Happy National Soup Month. Yeah, it’s a thing started in 1984 by — big surprise — Campbell Soup. It’s a no-brainer, really. Soup ticks all January’s boxes:

☑️ It’s a warming and soothing way to power through cold and flu season
☑️ It’s a nourishing corrective to holiday overindulgence
☑️ It’s a budget bonanza — one pot feeds a crowd
☑️ It’s endlessly versatile and hugely forgiving
☑️ It’s a delicious way to dial down food waste, welcoming the bits and bobs in your fridge that need using up

My mother’s chicken soup was legendary for its healing properties. Maybe your mother’s chicken soup was too. But my mom’s was the only soup my father knew, and he only got it when he was sick, so he didn’t like it. There’s a whole world of soups besides chicken. They can be brothy, they can be thick and substantial, they can be deeply satisfying, and we can keep the animals out of it.

What’s your favorite soup recipe? Please share it. It may well join the ranks of some of these soups of the world:

Haitian soupe joumou is a New Year’s Day tradition, but it deserves more than a day. This soup is a shining example of seasonality and economy, a celebration of winter squash and sturdy greens - the powerful foods of winter. It’s also a symbol of Haitian independence.

Andrea Nguyen’s vegan hot and sour soup hits all the flavor notes in the Chinese classic — the tang of vinegar tang, the umami of kombucha and mushrooms. It nails the mouthfeel, too. Eggs are out, tofu’s in.

Harira, a vegetable-rich Moroccan soup, is often used to break the daily fast during Ramadan. Why wait? It’s just the thing to take out the chill and warm your belly and heart for National Soup Month.

Cathy Katin-Grazzini shares her mulligatawny soup recipe from her new cookbook, Love the Foods That Love the Planet. Mulligatawny is a Raj era soup with Indian origins. It has a thousand variations and about as many spellings, but one must-have ingredient — beans. Beans, as I keep telling you, are among the most sustainable soil-nourishing crops we can grow. At the table, they have rich flavor, satisfying mouthfeel, and offer nothing but nourishment for us — they’re rich in protein, fiber, all the things. The recipe is included below for paid subscribers. Not a paid subscriber yet? You can sign up now to enjoy exclusive recipes, content and more.

Mushrooms get all the love in mushroom barley soup but don’t dismiss barley. These nubbly grains add oomph, texture and thickness. Barley is among the oldest of the ancient grains and one of the most sustainable, too. Another plus — this recipe is made with water rather than vegetable broth and thanks to dried mushrooms, it’s still deeply flavorful.

For soups that call for a vegetable broth base to impart richness, do I have a story for you.

Excerpted with permission from my book, Feeding the Hungry Ghost: Life, Faith and What to Eat for Dinner:

One brisk spring morning, a strange appears in a village (one of your classic plotlines, by the way). The stranger’s looking a little worse for wear and the village not much better. There’s been war, famine, poverty; in fact, all the horsemen of the apocalypse have ridden through, and it’s made the fownsfolk a little less than friendly. They suggest the man move along.

“Right away,’”he says, “but I’d like to stop for something to eat first.”

“Good luck, “ they say. “You won’t be finding any food here.’

He smiles. “No problem. Got everything I need right here. I’m in the mood fo stone soup.” He builds a small fire, fills a beat-up pot with water, and drops in what he says is his magic soup stone.

Magic and soup — these are both appealing things to those suffering hardship, and within minutes, the whole ragtag village has assembled to watch. The man stirs the pot and smiles. “Love a good stone soup,” he says. “But, you know, what really makes it special is a bit of cabbage.”

“Is that right?” One of the villagers produces a sorry-looking head of it.

“Great,” the stranger says. He chops up the cabbage and adds it to the pot.

“Thanks for helping me. You’ll have some soup with me when it’s ready, won’t you?

The villager is thrilled, also hungry.

Another villager asks what else goes into stone soup.

“Carrots are lovely, perhaps an onion, a potato, and I always like to add some greens — just like the kind growing around here.”

Pretty soon the whole village has ponied up a vegetable or two to be chopped up and added to the pot with the magic soup stone. It all comes together to be a rich, life-sustaining soup the entire village can enjoy.

You can do this, too, sans stone. You’ve already got the magic with my DIY vegetable broth. (Paid subscribers will find the recipe below.) It’s a method rather than a recipe, allowing you to magically turn vegetable bits into rich, sustaining vegetable broth. No packaging, no salt, no preservatives, no expense, and a great solution to food waste.

Let’a get that soup simmering and sing the virtues of “Beautiful Soup.”

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