THE COOKBOOK TEST #108: GOOD SOUP

INSTALLMENT #108 (PAID) SOUP: THE (LIQUID) STAFF OF LIFE / GOOD DESIGN AESTHETIC / PUMPKIN PUNISHMENT /

Dear Subscribers,

Historically speaking, I haven’t been much for volunteering - not from any lack of interest, but rather for a lack of time and a sense of: “How do I do this? And how does it work?”

But a recent profile of a neighborhood soup kitchen in the excellent Longfellow Whatever got me through the doors of a group called Soup for You, and I’ve found the work to be really satisfying. It’s hospitality: Making delicious scratch soups to serve as the backbone of community meals for anyone and everyone who wants (or needs) to eat nutritious soup. The “feeding people in need” part captured my heart and the “soup is actually really good” part captured my culinary sensibilities, and I hope to stick with the work for a while.

The volunteer work has necessarily caused me to think about soup a lot more than I might otherwise. It’s interesting stuff: It can be a minor accompaniment to a meal, or it can be the meal itself. It can be gauzy and ephemeral, or meaty and hearty. It can be simplicity itself or a refined work of culinary art. It’s one category, but it has a thousand expressions that span seasons, cultures, and whole phyla of ingredients. In our house, the big soups are Caldo Verde, Ramen, and my friend Karsten’s incredible Chili [1], but during colder weather [2], it’s one of my favorite things to play around with because it holds up well and can scale up or down from snack to full meal with relative ease.

Thus the appeal of GOOD SOUP, a book by European soup entrepreneurs that presents 52 different varieties of the stuff. The authors are a Michelin-starred chef (Joris Bijdendijk) and a sausage maker (Samuel Levie), both based in the Netherlands, with a ton of soup and non-soup-related chops. There’s a lot to explore here.

at your service,

James

GOOD SOUP: 52 COLORFUL RECIPES FOR YEAR-ROUND COMFORT
BY JORIS BIJDENDIJK AND SAMUEL LEVIE
TRA PUBLISHING | 2023

It would be difficult to over-praise the design of Good Soup. Its recipes have been edited to a standard length so that the book’s formatting is soothingly consistent: On the first page, you get the recipe title, description and method, ingredient list. On the second page, a big, clean, inviting photo of the soup on a background that pops with bold color. The book overall is organized into categories that make perfect sense: white / orange / yellow / green / red / meat-forward soups, with the seemingly superficial color categories actually doing a pretty good job of sorting for flavor profiles and ingredients (cream-forward, pumpkin and squash, greens, tomatoes, etc.)

Rarely do cookbooks come this well organized, this appealing, this usable, and this colorful. I hope to see this design scheme stolen outright by lots of other books in the years to come, because it’s a joy to look at and a joy to use.

A FOOL-SUCCEPTIBLE PUMPKIN SOUP

Up until Good Soup, pumpkin soup was on my “pretty much impossible to mess up” list of culinary favorites. See a variation of pumpkin soup that intrigues you? Give it a shot. What can go wrong?