Soup Suppers: More than 100 Main-Course Soups and 40 Accompaniments

by Arthur Schwartz

Overview

Healthful, practical, and economical, soup as a main course is a natural for the way people eat today. In Soup Suppers, Arthur Schwartz provides everything you need to know to turn a simple soup into a sensational meal.

His chapters are conveniently organized by main ingredient and feature recipes that offer something for everyone. Here are new recipes for soups from around the world as well as favorites from just around the block, all made equally accessible to American cooks and their kitchens. Here you will find everything from simple, homey dishes like Chicken Gumbo, Fresh Tomato Soup, and Chili con Carne to such adventuresome departures from the everyday as Porcini, Potato, and Barley Soup; Thai Shrimp Soup; and Moroccan Harira with Chick-peas.

In addition to the soups themselves, Arthur Schwartz provides recipes for accompaniments—breads, salads, appetizers, and desserts—that make his already hearty soups complete meals. Bruschetta, Popovers, and Walnut Onion Muffins are easy to prepare and delicious on the side of a soup, as are healthy recipes for Celery and Parmesan Salad, Marinated Mushrooms, and String Beans with Garlic and Sesame Oil. There is no better way to end a meal than with Arthur Schwartz's recipes for desserts, including Oatmeal Lace Cookies, Blueberry Apple Crumble, and Swedish Almond Cake.

Presented in the relaxed and friendly manner for which Arthur Schwartz is known, Soup Suppers offers a versatile and satisfying, wholesome and hearty approach to home-cooked meals.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060969486
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	01/28/1994
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	7.37(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

Arthur Schwartz hosts "Food Talk," a popular New York City-based, nationally syndicated radio show, and was the longtime restaurant critic and food editor of the New York Daily News. He is the author of Cooking in a Small Kitchen, What to Cook When You Think There's Nothing in the House to Eat, and Soup Suppers.

Read an Excerpt

Foreword

From Sop to Soup to Supper

Soup: The sound of eating it must have suggested the word, which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), definitely descends from the word sop (and sip), which itself goes back to the beginnings of the Indo-European languages.

Linguistically speaking, from soup (an adaptation of the Old French souppe) to supper, the meal at which soup was taken, is not much of a stretch. In antique English, then, the title Soup Suppers would be redundant, while in modern life the idea is to make sensible, enjoyable, no-fuss food for your loved ones. Most of these soup suppers are meant to be informal meals. You can take almost any recipe in this book, add a tossed salad, bread, and fresh fruit, and either call in the family or call up some company. Under the heading "Supper Suggestions" at the beginning of each recipe you'll also find other menu recommendations for the occasions when you have the time and desire to prepare a more complex meal. After the chapters on vegetable, bean and grain, meat, chicken, fish and shellfish, and cold soups, there are coordinated recipe chapters on breads (only one baked with yeast), on vegetable and salad appetizers and side dishes, and on desserts (mostly fruit-based). In essence, Soup Suppers is a world of meals unto itself.

About this word "sop": Its modern meaning is "a piece of bread, or the like, dipped or steeped in water, wine, etc., before being eaten or cooked" and, with that meaning, it came into use in English in 1100, according to the OED. In the beginning, in the days before eating tools became common, a sop was, in fact, a tool for eating soup. Itwasn't until 1533 that Catherine de Medici introduced the fork to France when she married Henry II, and even then it supposedly did not catch on in England until the early 1600s. Spoons were far more common during the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance, but sops remained an important part of the meal. They were and are delicious, as anyone who has ever dunked bread will testify.

In Food in History (Stein & Day, 1973), Reay Tannahill, by way of explaining the four main textural categories of food served in the Middle Ages, which were largely dictated by the eating implements available, recounts this story about sops:

The number of sops in a serving was taken by guests as an indication of their host's meanness or generosity; the more, the better. On one occasion, when the Sieur de Vandy dined at the home of the Comte de Grandpr?, "they placed before him a soup in which there were only two poor sops chasing each other around. Vandy tried to take one up but, as the plate was enormous, he missed his aim; he tried again, and could not catch it. He rose from the table and called his valet de chambre.

"You there! Pull off my boots."

"What are you going to do?" his neighbor asked him.

"Permit me to have my boots removed," said Vandy coldly, "and I propose to dive into that plate in order to seize that sop!"

A sop has also lately come to mean a dish into which you mean to dunk bread, not just the bread itself. There are many in Soup Suppers--a pot of red peppers with garlic, shallots, olives, and capers and their rendered juices, a saffron and garlic broth that's drunk up by bread and potatoes, a Sicilian-style fava bean pur?e that is nothing without garlic toast. You probably never realized that a crock of French onion soup with croutons and cheese is really a sop, probably an ancient one.

I come from a serious soup-making, soup-eating family. My maternal grandfather, with whom my immediate family shared a house, had to have burning hot soup at every meal. My other grandfather was actually at one time a professional soup maker, selling Manhattan clam chowder and other prepared foods to New York bars and grills.

One of my father's gastronomic preoccupations was thick soup, but he loved them all. He might tell you his favorite was mushroom-barley or a split-pea soup that "you can cut with a knife," though you'd never guess it by the gusto with which he savored a bowl of clear chicken soup or cold schav thickened with nothing but sour cream.

My maternal grandfather's obsession with the temperature of soup created several memorable arguments between him and my grandmother. To this day, I can see myself sitting with him at the table in the dinette while my grandmother, only a few steps away in the adjoining kitchen, announced, at the top of her lungs, "Okay, Lou, the soup is simmering. Now I'm ladling it into the bowl. Now I'm walking toward the table. You want it hotter you'll have to eat it out of the pot."

I didn't get his point then, but I do now: When it arrives at the table, soup, if it's supposed to be a hot soup, should be hotter than is really comfortable to sip. You want to catch the soup at every level of temperature, letting it reveal its different aspects as it cools.

Had my father lived to taste his way through the recipe testing for this book he would not have been disappointed in the thickness of these soups. With the obvious exception of those soups that are broths, all these recipes have been formulated to be so thick and filling that they can serve as main courses, with only a salad and simple dessert to fill out the menu. One of the great things about soup is that it is flexible: You want it thinner? Add liquid. You want it thicker? Let the liquid evaporate more by cooking it uncovered. It needs "a little something"? Add that something.

Following are some points you should note before you begin cooking.

On Water

Use only cold running tap water or bottled water. Hot tap water is more likely to contain minerals (such as lead) from your plumbing.

On Pots

Most of the soups in this book were cooked in either an 8-quart stainless steel boiling pot with a sandwiched aluminum and copper bottom (the kind sold by several major American cookware manufacturers), a 6-quart tin-lined copper casserole, a 5-quart aluminum Dutch oven, or a 4-quart enameled cast iron casserole. The boiled dinners were cooked in a 10-quart cast iron casserole. Soup Suppers. Copyright ? by Arthur Schwartz. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Editorial Reviews

Soup Suppers: More Than 100 Main-Course Soups and 40 Accompaniments by the celebrated radio talk-show host and cookbook author Arthur Schwartz offers a nicely rounded group of international soups that can serve as meals.

bn.com

Soup Suppers is an enormously enticing book, an inspiration for cooking easy, inexpensive, and nourishing meals with seasonal ingredients. This is the way I want to cook for my family and friends.

Alice Waters

Like Arthur Schwartz, I come 'from a serious soup-making, soup-eating family'. But I must say, the Scotch Broth and Corn Chowder I was weaned on pale beside this colorful collection, which includes some superb-sounding Russian and Middle Eastern soups I've never heard of. Arthur makes them all sound so easy, so delicious, I can't wait to haul out the soup kettle. Soup Suppers is one cookbook that is going to end up with plenty of smudges and spatters—the ultimate compliment!

Jean Anderson

Why do I love Soup Suppers like I do? First and foremost, it is by Arthur Schwartz, whose no-nonsense palate knows what good tastes like. Second ... there is no second!

Julie Sahni

Schwartz, author of What To Cook When You Think There's Nothing in the House To Eat ( LJ 12/91), is a New York City food critic and radio host. Here he offers 100 hearty, satisfying soups and stews, along with 50 or so recipes for accompaniments from breads and appetizers to desserts. James Peterson's impressive Splendid Soups ( LJ 9/15/93) with some 400 recipes is the undisputed first choice, but Schwartz's more homey compendium is recommended for most collections. BOMC selection.

Library Journal