Food 22: hunker down

happy first day of autumn!

Morning! Use the website or app if this post gets chopped off in email.

People get so absurdly overexcited about their autumn wardrobes, treating each season as if known, familiar things were an absolute revelation - wait, you mean, brown exists? Suede handbags are available? I could maybe get some things a bit like shoes but taller, made of leather, called boots?

But I understand, because I feel like that about autumn food. Soups! Stews! Also mashed potato, and by extension butter. And squashes. Every autumn I behold them with wonderment and awe, as if I’d never seen a butternut before in my life. I marvel at the exquisitely imperfect stripes of Delicata. I do my annual thing of wondering, for minutes at a time, whether Crown Prince is grey-green or blue-grey, and what I’d call the colour if my job was Namer of Paints (which would be such a heavenly job, better even than Namer of Lipsticks). And look at Turk’s Turban, on the left below! It is a completely bonkers vegetable. ↓

Photo by Evergreens & Dandelions on Unsplash

Squashes are ancient - primitive - and it really pleases me that they still look it. They are the vegetable equivalent of meeting a Neanderthal person (hysterically funny link) at the shops.

They originated in south America 8,000 years ago and didn’t arrive in Europe until the 16th century. Despite this, I always picture them being eaten in medieval times in a thatched, wattle-and-daub hut in 1300s Britain. The woman is spinning wool in the fading light, the man is on his way back from the field, the children are tending to the animals and there are a pair of blackened squashes roasting in the embers of the dying fire.

I mean, there really aren’t - it’s hundreds of years too early - but it’s still what I picture every time I clap eyes on a squash because I can’t properly imagine anything pre-medieval¹, like how the Moche peoples of pre-Peru cooked their squash dinner, or what their dwellings looked like. So I always default to medieval Brits .

Squash-shaped Moche vessel, 2nd-4th century CE. I am startled to learn from Wikipedia that surviving Moche ceramics mostly depict anal sex.

PS In medieval times such huts had a fire lit on the floor in the middle of their one room at all times - very smoky for the people, plus obviously no windows. Also the animals, e.g. a pig or a cow, lived in half or a third of the room. Survival depended entirely on whether you were able to grow enough food that year to feed your family. Also if you were a peasant, as you would have been in this hut scenario, you had to pay a tithe (10% of your piddly earnings) to the church as thanks for your great good fortune, even though you and your family were unbelievably poor and worked like absolute donkeys, including the small children.

Anyway, shall we get on? Sorry for the detours. I find medieval domestic life really interesting. (According to this novel by Robert Harris, it’s basically what we’ll go back to after the techpocalypse).

I came to soup late in life because I have always associated it with old or infirm people. At one point my grandfather and great-uncle were both in quite smart old people’s residences - one had a golf course - and my abiding memory of going to lunch at either of them is of dozens of otherwise sprauncy old people eating soup and SLURPING in unison. Why would you give soup to slurpers, or indeed to people with poor hand-eye coordination? (Some people seem not to mind slurping. I absolutely can’t abide it, especially of tea - I have to leave the room. It’s made me furious even to imagine it while writing this sentence).

Larry David and friends playing golf. I don’t think Larry would slurp, though he does often eat with his mouth open. This has made me remember that episode called The Ugly Section (‘HOW DID I WIND UP HERE?’), where he tries to get seated with the more attractive people, to no avail

Laksas, Thai soups and Chinese soups aside, the only soups I really liked until I was in my 40s were sorrel soup, very Belgian, and also fish soup, because it had interesting things in it and you ate it with a giant crouton and rouille and melty Gruyère. I still love fish soup but it’s a faff to make. Note: those everlasting French jars or pouches of ready-made fish soup are a really handy thing to have around when you’re starving and the cupboard is bare. Stale bread becomes croutons, and here’s another recipe for rouille (the first is in the caption below), although you can improvise with bought mayonnaise zuzhed up with cayenne, paprika or harissa if you have it. Those little glass jars of ready-made rouille that fishmongers sell are decent too.

Image from Delicious magazine, accompanying recipe here.

My other issue with soup has historically been its monotony: every mouthful the same, and with the same boring uniform, bland texture. The solution to this is, obviously, to make really zingy, punchily flavoured soups (unless you are in fact unwell, in which case there’s no point in even trying to approximate Heinz Cream of Tomato, and anyway why would you, if you were ill? You’d stay in bed and send someone to the shops).

Lots of recipes say ‘I promise it’s even better than Heinz Cream of Tomato’. This is lies. It may be ‘better’, but it’s never as good.

I think a lot of soups are cooked for way too long - maybe because people confuse it with making stock - to the point where everything is slumped and saggy, including the flavours. They are also often over-diluted. I would always rather have a smaller bowl of something intensely delicious than a larger one of something bland. And I think that the more embellishments, the better. Nobody’s going to say ‘no thank you, I think I’ll pass’ on the basil oil and dollop of ricotta, or on the crispy bacon bits, or on the melting grated cheese. My mother made very good vichyssoise when I was little but to me the main point of it was the little piece of butter in the middle of the bowl, melting deliciously into the leek and potato.

I became a soup convert after reading Anna Jones’ first cookbook, A Modern Way To Eat. I have no recollection of ever making soup before I read it. It had - has - a brilliant chart that made a point of deciding your main soup ingredient and then, if you were unsure of what you were doing, adding:

• a flavourful base layer,

• a herb,

• a spice,

• a backup flavour (like a second vegetable)

• something for heft,

• and something to scatter on top

- so for example a soffrito base (fried-down onion, carrot and celery), then some fresh sage, dried chilli flakes, our friend butternut squash, a bit of last-minute wilted spinach, torn up bread and a swirl of yogurt, though in this particular example I’d consider crumbs of chorizo.

This method opened my eyes to the possibilities of soup and I’ve never looked back. If you apply this layering system to any soup you make, your soup will never be dull again. Also, season boldly. People freak out about salt, but really - it’s not the salt in your home-made soup that’s going to harm you. Speaking of too much salt, I went to a Chinese supermarket in Norwich yesterday afternoon and they had these crisps, which Lay’s make for the Chinese market. THEY ARE SO GOOD.

I also bought crisps in fried crab flavour, roasted cumin lamb skewer flavour, and roasted garlic oyster flavour. I don’t normally love a flavoured crisp but these are incredible. I could perfectly well just eat a bag for dinner. (Here’s a lovely and fascinating piece about Spanish crisps, which as you’ll know are the best crisps, just potato, olive oil and salt, cooked fresh every day if you’re lucky enough to live near a crisp shop).

Anyway: there are lots of free to read soup and stew recipes on Anna Jones’ website. At this time of year, make her take on ribollita and also the lemony lentil soup with crispy kale ↓.

Image: annajones.co.uk.

Also, her most recent book, Easy Wins, has a delicious recipe for coconut and tomato laksa, which you can find extracted here.

I’m not going to list all my favourite soups because it would take forever - I honestly think that if you are a soup sceptic, the most useful thing is to follow the above blueprint ingredients-wise. But I do have to point you again to this ultra-easy and utterly delicious soup from Jenny Rosentrach’s massively excellent book The Weekday Vegetarians (its even simpler sequel is just out in the UK). Here it is. I use pesto from the deli and jarred beans from Bold Bean Co and it takes moments to make. The sherry vinegar is what makes it so great, so don’t leave it out. ↓.

Image from Dinner: A Love Story

If you want new and exciting soup inspiration without going out and buying a giant soup encyclopaedia, I really recommend Blasta Books’ small but mighty Soup book. I wrote about this brilliant book collection back in July - they’re all fantastic (the sets are currently on sale), and there’s a dedicated soup one ↓ that is absolutely great - really nice recipes from around the world.

I was going to do stews too, but this post is getting too long, so that’s going to have to wait til next time.

Thank you for reading! These fortnightly food posts are free for everyone. They alternate with shorter picture posts, which are also free. Everything else is for paid subscribers, so do consider that if you’d like to. Either way, have a wonderful Sunday, enjoy the first official day of autumn (rain here all day, apparently), and if you liked this post then do please super kindly hit the ❤️ button - it makes it more visible. Thank you!

PS Local news: if you’re in or near Suffolk, today is the last day of the Boule-in fête d’automne, an excellent and very fun shopping opportunity if you like vintage French homeware (anything from midcentury pieces to old rustic ones). The charming people who run it live in France half the year, scooting about buying things from brocantes and vide-greniers, and then come back and sell it all from their house during one of these events, which only happen four times a year. It’s a really nice vibe and there is coffee and very good cake in the garden. All details and info here. The Bildeston Crown across the road will do you a proper Sunday lunch and put you up if you don’t feel like going home afterwards.

1. Can you? I’m genuinely interested. I can summon up a caveman bumbling about with a club, but then nothing at all until about the 11th century. Do let me know in the comments, I’d like to know if it’s just me and the huge gaps in my history knowledge.