The Joy of Soup

White Bean Soup with Cabbage and Salmon

The Soup Lady recently had occasion to visit King's Fish House in California and ordered some White Bean and Salmon soup.

The menu proudly announces that the soups are made fresh daily from scratch. It remains unclear what exactly they were scratching when they made this one because it was a huge disappointment.  Although the chunks of salmon in the bowl were sizable and plentiful, I don't recall any actual beans in there and the tomato-based broth was quite watery.

Never one to give up at the first skirmish, the Soup Lady continued to think about just how good this  could be. A little internet research turned up a few recipes that were surprisingly different beyond the basic beans and fish ingredients. After a week in the test kitchen, I find that this one is the best of the bunch.

The recipe comes from  Prevention.com so you know it's got to be good for you, too. The website says:  "The ingredients in this hearty meal not only help prevent cancer and heart disease--they also stave off ulcers."  Stave off more than that, I bet, with its double whammy of cabbage and beans in the same pot. Have mercy!

 

White Bean Soup with Cabbage and Salmon

1 cup navy beans, picked over, rinsed, and soaked overnight
2½ cups water
2 cups chicken broth
6 cloves garlic, minced
1 bay leaf
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
½ head cabbage, coarsely chopped
1 large onion, chopped
½ pound skinned salmon fillet, cut into 1" chunks
2 ounces (2 thick slices) Canadian bacon, coarsely chopped
1 tablespoon chopped fresh thyme

1. In a large saucepan or Dutch oven, combine the beans, water, broth, garlic, and bay leaf. Bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer, stirring occasionally, for 50 minutes, or until the beans are very tender. Remove and discard the bay leaf.

2. In a food processor or blender, puree the soup in batches until smooth. Return the soup to the pot and bring to a boil over medium heat. Cover to keep warm.

3. Meanwhile, heat 1 tablespoon of the oil in a large nonstick skillet over high heat. Add the cabbage and onion. Cook, stirring frequently, for 6 minutes, or until lightly browned and tender.

4. Add to the soup.

5. In the same skillet, heat the remaining 1 tablespoon oil over medium heat. Add the salmon and bacon. Sprinkle with the thyme.

6. Cook, stirring gently, for 3 minutes, or until the salmon is lightly browned and just opaque.

7. Gently stir the salmon mixture into the soup.          Makes 4 Servings

The Soup Lady is proud to announce that The Soup is now part of the Carnival of New Jersey Bloggers.  Visit  Reihl World View where Chef Dan serves up this week's menu, with help from the sous chef Mr. Snitch.

Papas a la Huancaina

Peruvian Potatoes with Chile-Cheese Sauce

When the Soup Lady was a still-blossoming young sophisticate living in Manhattan but still relatively unexposed to the whole wide world, there was an informal gathering of co-workers. The term "pot-luck" might be applied here, but since this important event became the benchmark by which all cocktail party/dinner party/hostessing events was judged for the next 10 years, I hesitate to apply that common term.

All invited guests were to bring something to eat. We were all single young nurses who worked in the same NYC hospital - transplants from other states who couldn't resist the lure of the Big City. The hostess was the only native New Yorker - she herself was an exotic and unfamiliar creature to me.  She lived with her father, who was recently widowed and needed the kind and caring ministrations of a loving family member (because he was a whiskey-soaked reclusive  alcoholic) in an antique filled pre-war apartment in the East 70s. They didn't always eat dinner, but they made sure they had cocktails together every evening - a lifestyle unimagined by the limited and sheltered Soup Lady, whose entire reference to paternal imbibing was encompassed by her own dear father bending an elbow at local AmVets Hall to lift a shot and a beer.

Everything about that place was a look into another life-style. The cocktail nuts they set out were served in the monogrammed silver porringer that she used as a toddler! There was an oil painting on the wall of her as a child! Mummy's family silver was brandished about! The place was 10 rooms and had woodwork, fireplaces and maid's quarters - so unlike the white-walled studios that the young nurses rented.  It was all surreall and made a damn big impression on the Soup Lady, I'll tell you that. I am becoming breathless just trying to recall it all.

Back to the party: one girl brought a fresh pineapple wrapped in a pineapple-patterned dish towel and tied with a real ribbon. Such creative elegance was never seen by the Soup Lady before. All the other girls nodded approvingly  and she had to explain to me that the pineapple was the colonial symbol of hospitality. You had better believe that the Soup Lady made sure she showed up with a pineapple any place she went for the next 10 years.

Okay, we're getting way far off the subject here. Back to the food: one girl (where did she come from? She wasn't a nurse - she must have been someone's friend) who was a native of South America brought an appetizer made of cold potato slices with a spicy cream sauce on top. Eveyone oohed over it and pronounced it devine, but the Soup Lady took that opportunity to paw through the porringer to sneak a few extra macadamia nuts while everyone else was distracted. By the time the dust cleared, there was just one small bit of unclaimed potato left.

It was divine. And spicy. There was no time to chat up the cook, as she was off to another engagement. All that could be determined at that time was that the dish was famous in Peru.

And with only that to go on, the Soup Lady has been trying to deduce what it could have been all these long years. How many suburban parties and potlucks could have been turned around if only I had the recipe that made that one night long ago so memorable? And,  Lord luv the internet, here it is:

Papas a la Huancaina
Cover 8 whole potatoes with salted water and boil until cooked through.  Remove from heat, drain and cool.  Peel potatoes when cool and cut into 1/2" slices.

Puree the 1 cup of grated cheese (mozzarella, feta or muenster) and 1 cup of half and half  in a blender till smooth.

Heat 1/4 cup of oil in a skillet over medium flame.  Saute 2 finely diced jalapeno  peppers for  1-2 minutes.  Add cheese-cream mixture and heat through till smooth and thickened.  Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Line serving plate with lettuce leaves.  Place slices of potatoes on top of the lettuce leaves.  Spoon chile-cheese sauce on top of  the potatoes.  Garnish serving plate with hard-boiled egg quarters and tomato wedges.  Sprinkle chopped black olives over the potatoes and serve. Papas a la Huancaina is best served at room temperature.
recipe from Whats4Eats.com

The memory of a slightly pink cast to the sauce leads me to believe there must have been some cayenne pepper or hot sauce in there as well.

And so eventually, the Soup Lady got over her painful and limited past and escaped the bonds of pineapple giving, although any scan of a Tiffany's catalog where a silver porringer is sighted does make the heart beat faster. And you can bet your ass that anyone who sets foot into La Casa de la Sopa  this summer is going to get a face full of spicy papas and a few casually tossed-off references to pre-war apartments and silver porringers.

Red Snapper Soup

The Soup Lady recently had the opportunity to partake of what the waiter referred to as "the best fish soup in the world." The scene was the Drake Bros. Restaurant located in the Drake Hotel in Chicago and the soup was Bookbinder Soup.

The soup was very delicious and the experience was made even more delightful when the waiter served a mini-carafe of an excellent cream sherry along side the bowl. He floated the sherry on top of the hot soup and the first spoonful was shocking and breath-taking.  The soup itself was rich without being greasy, dense without being stew-ish and savory without being salty. Overall rating: delightful.

In fact, The Soup Lady was so taken with it, that upon return home  the interweb was quickly pressed into service to look up the recipe. And that's where it all went wrong. The waiter had called it a red snapper soup and because he said "fish soup", wouldn't you assume that it was a soup made out of red snapper? Don't be naive!

It turns out that this is  a famous creation from Bookbinder's Restaurant in Philadelphia. You can buy it in cans or you can make your own from a recipe such as this one. Is it now painfuly obvious that everyone except the Soup Lady understands that the soup I enjoyed so much was a red soup made from a snapper (turtle), not a soup made from a red snapper (fish).

Now it may seem like a fine culinary  line to you, but eating fish is something I'm used to doing. Eating combative reptilian scavengers when you are expecting to eat fish is another thing entirely.

The Soup Lady does not like to be fooled. That is why you will never find discussion about magicians here - why would I pay good money to see a show by someone  who is out to fool me? I'm afraid I must throw the Drake Bros.' waiter into this catagory now, too - a new personal catagory of mine called As Bad As A Magician.  If I ever say that you are As Bad As A Magician, cower! It is a grave insult.

It was very sneaky of him to call it Red  Snapper Soup instead of just Snapper Soup and downright dishonest to say that it was fish soup when clearly he knew it was not.  That's probably how they unload the stuff everyday - otherwise they would be stuck with a potful of it at the end of serving hours. The reason that I am so put out by this is because it is a violation of the basic implied waiter/patron agreement - if one cannot trust the integrity of one's waiter, then were does that leave one? It leaves one with egg on their face and turtle in their mouth, that's where.

Now you are on your own with this - yes, it was an exteremely tasty soup but if knew before hand what it really was, I would never have ordered it. And I certainly will not ever have it again.

Cavender's All Purpose Greek Seasoning

Who would have thought anything good would ever come out of Arkansas? And yet here it is - the world's best seasoning combination: Cavender's All Purpose Greek Seasoning.

The Mister was in Florida and tasted this on a salad that was served to him. When he complimented the flavor, his host gave him a shaker to take back home. On the back was a phone number and a P.O. box number in Arkansas, so we called up and then sent a check to the company address for 6 containers.

Since then, we've been reordering on a regular basis. I hear they are in some superstores now, but I've never seen it around here. If you see it, pick it up for yourself because it is unequivocally  the very best tasting  seasoning mix that I know.

It's a mix of spices, herbs and some yummy MSG (does not contain lavender flowers). We use most of our stash on salads: oil, lime juice, Cavender's and some extra dried oregano. It goes equally well on any vegetable, in dips and sauces, on meats and eggs. The website where you can order some also has some interesting  recipes, including this one:

Spike's Famous Biscuits

* 4 cups Bisquick
* 1 tbsp. sugar
* 1 tbsp. Cavender's Greek Seasoning    
* 1 can of beer

Consistency of dough depends on beer quantity. If too thin, add 1/2 cup more of Bisquick. Roll out dough and cut into bisquit rounds and bake at high temperature.

We put in a bit more seasoning and some extra dried oregano. It makes one tasty biscuit and stands up to any hearty stew or soup.

Cavender's All Purpose Greek Seasoning - get some. You won't be sorry.

 

 

Celery and Stilton Soup

The Soup Lady likes nothing better than when someone else does the work. To that end, I enthusiastically recommend trawling the internet until you come across non-food blogs that have called for recipe submissions.  The Carnival of the Recipes is one of the more interesting ones. Conceived and originated by Beth of  She Who Will Be Obeyed! , it's the ultimate Real People/Real Recipes collection.  The submissions are dishes that people actually like so much that they wish to share with others.

It wasn't easy but I managed to maintain my lurker status until this gem showed up thanks to Cathy of Blue Heron at Druid Labs. I like this soup because it's simple yet rich and it's very easy to whip up.

Celery and Stilton Soup

1 bunch celery, 1  medium onion (chopped), 3 tablespoons of butter, 3 3/4 cups light vegetable or chicken stock, 2 egg yolks, 2/3 cup of half and half, 1 cup of crumbled blue cheese, salt and pepper to taste.

Reserve the inner leaves from the celery and chop the remaining celery. Melt butter in a large saucepan. Gently cook celery and onion, covered, until soft.  Add stock and bring to a boil. Simmer 20 minutes or until vegetables are tender. Cool slightly. In a food processor fitted with a metal blade or a blender, process mixture to a puree. Return puree to pan and reheat gently without bringing to a boil.

To finish the soup, beat egg yolks and half-and-half in a small bowl. Stir a small ladleful of hot soup into the egg mixutre and pour back into the pan. Stir in crumbled blue cheese, stirring constantly until soup thickens. Season with salt and pepper and garnish with inner celery leaves. Serve immediately.

Cathy writes these additional tips: "The recipe calls for Stilton, but gorgonzola works fine as will any strong blue. It's far easier to use a wand blender [to puree], and you don't have to wait for the soup to cool. If the soup is to be held, be sure to reheat gently."

The Soup Lady is a big fan of handheld blenders. Not only is it faster, easier and neater than using a food processor, but the big advantage as I see it is that there is far less washing up to do. For the ultimate in low kitchen clean-up, see if you can fox someone else into making the soup and taking a picture of it so you can see what it looks like. Thanks, Cathy!

Taste Test: Hot Dog with Mustard Flavored Potato Chips

There comes a time in everyone's life when you are faced with the a bizarre food item. This can be something homemade (Coffee Jello), mass-produced (Pizza Flavored goldfish crackers), even a beverage (beer and tomato juice) There is the lure of a food that you like combined with something iffy. Not something horrible - if it was horrible, you wouldn't even consider tasting it but by combining it with something not entirely objectionable, it just leaves on unsure as to what to do about it all.

And that's where the Soup Lady comes in. As a public service, I have undertaken to put these unusual foods to a taste test. We begin with this: Snyder's Of Hanover Coney Island Hot Dog with Mustard Flavored Potato chips.

Now I've tried Salt & Vinegar flavored, Sour Cream & chive flavored - heck, I've even had the ketchup flavored ones (that one was a definate miss), but this is something hard to imagine. Take a minute to think about it: potato chips that taste like a hot dog with mustard. That's what they want you to believe anyway. From the back of the chip package:"Welcome to Coney Island. Take a stroll and enjoy the most mouth watering taste of hot dogs with mustard flavor in this premium potato chip. It's a taste so authentic , you'll almost be able to feel the ocean breeze and hear the sounds of the boardwalk. " Let's just see.

The newest member of the Panel of Judges in our test kitchen's Pennsylvania annex was first to try these. She is something of a fussy eater in that anything with dairy or raspberries is an automatic out, but other than that, she's a go. In fact, she's fond of junk food and is always on the lookout for a good mid-afternoon pick-me-up. She prudently started with a gentle sniffing of the open package and pronounced the aroma to be "strange". In appearance, it looks like the standard ruffled chip - veru unremarkable. One cautious bite and the judge went running for water. She pronounced them to be a very strong mustard flavor but overall "bad" and declared she would not put another in her mouth.

Well, what kind of taste test is just one bite? So the Soup Lady herself stepped up to the plate. I found the first chip to be a very good imitation of a hot dog but couldn't taste the mustard at all. The second chip had visible yellow patches on it and was indeed quite mustardy. Apparently, the chips themselves are hot dog flavored and mustard flavored powder is sprayed onto them. The flavor combination varied widely from one chip to the next.

Just as the taste test was concluding, an impartial passerby strolled near the Test Kitchen Annex and was quickly cast in the role of a tie-breaker. He tasted, mulled it over, tasted again and said: "They're good. I feel like I'm at a cook-out." Very much in the same vein as the blurb on the package back."

The reviews -
The Fussy Taste-Tester: "I would never eat another one. They were disgusting."
The Soup Lady: "This tastes like a hot dog, but not a very good hot dog."
A Passerby: "I feel like I'm at a cookout."

So - a split decision. You'll just have to try them for yourself.

Queen Victoria Soup

Without any explanation but this: "A modern adaptation of a rich and famous English soup", the Fannie Farmer Boston Cooking School Cookbook (1951 edition) gives us this recipe for Queen Victoria Soup. How famous could it be, really? I couldn't find a single reference to it anywhere else. This must have come from the era of Frech Toast and Belgain Waffles - the time when stay-at-home Americans, perhaps influenced by the returned soldier boys of WWII, fancied themselves to be sophisticated familiars with all things European. Thus, not just English soup, but historical English soup.

It makes a damned fine soup wherever it really came from. It hearty enough to be a meal on its own with just a nice crusty bread to go along with it and a piece of fruit for dessert.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . QUEEN VICTORIA SOUP

1 tablespoon butter
1 teaspoon minced onion
1/2 cup mushrooms, cut fine
1 cup diced celery
4 cups chicken stock
1 tablespoon tapioca
1/2 cup cooked chicken, diced
1/2 cup cooked ham, diced
salt and pepper
sage, nutmeg and onion salt
2 hard-cooked eggs
1 or 2 cups cream
chopped parsley

Melt butter, add onion and cook until yellow. Add mushrooms and celery; cook 10 minutes. Add stock, tapioca, chicken, ham and seasonings. Cook 20 minutes. Add eggs, chopped fine, and cream. Serve in big bowls with chopped parsley on top. serves 7-8

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Now comes the scary part: a post-script at the end of the recipe says:
"To simplify, use canned cream of mushroom soup in place of fresh mushrooms, and cream and canned luncheon meat in place of ham. Not the same, but still very good and a thought for the emergency shelf."

When they say canned luncheon meat, they mean Spam. See? WWII, just like I said.

Pagach

How is it possible that the Soup Lady has lived her whole life and never even been in the same room with a pagach? It is , after all, part of my ethnic heritage and certainly fits the criteria for Salvic foods: white, cheap and greasy. Yum Yum.

During a visit to our home town, the Soup Sister (who now lives in Georgia) expressed a desire to taste pagach once more. "Whatever do you mean once more?" says I. Turns out that while I went for the bright lights/big city experience, she immersed herself in the local culture of northeastern Pennsylvania and became something of a pagach connoisseur. Not only did she know where to find them, she kept up a running comentary evaluating each local maker's results, all while the Soup Lady was at the wheel, desperately trying to peer through the mists of memory to find the correct winding mountain road in the pitch dark.

And what is this mysterious delicacy, you might wonder? What creation could be so delicious as to overcome its unfortunate clunker of a name and become the object of desire? It's a stuffed bread, usually made from cabbage or potato filling baked inside of pizza dough. That's right - the local pizza parlors all have pagach on the menu and that is what we were searching for - a pizza parlor. Here we see the pagach nestled snuggly in its pizza box on the morning after. It is nothing if not filling, so despite the longing, we were only able to consume a few cuts.

Pagach
Dough:
2-1/2 cups flour
1 cup warm water
1 pkg yeast
1/2 teaspoon salt

Cabbage filling:
1 lg onion peeled and sliced
1 med head cabbage, shredded
1/2 cup oil
salt
pepper

Potato filling:
3 potatoes
1 medium onion
1/4 lb oleo
1 tablespoon milk
5 oz cheddar cheese

The dough: Dissolve yeast in the water. add salt and 2 1/2 cups flour and knead smooth and
elastic, adding more flour as needed. Place dough on countertop, cover with
stainless steel bowl. Allow to rise double in bulk.

Potato filling: Cook the potatoes in 2 quarts salted water, until done. Drain. Fry onion in oleo until golden. Add to the potatoes. Add cheese, milk and salt and pepper and mash with the potatoes.

Cabbage filling:
Saute onion in oil until soft. Add shredded cabbage and salt and pepper and cover and cook until cabbage is tender and soft. Drain off any excess oil.

Assembly:
Punch down dough and divide into 2 parts. Cut bread dough in half. Roll out one half and place on cookie sheet. Place cooled potato filling on one side of the dough and spread the cabbage filling on the other half, leaving a 2 inch margin at the edges. Cover with the other half of the dough. Carefully pinch edges together. Brush oil over the top of the dough and sprinkle with salt or garlic salt. Place on greased baking sheet. Let rise until double.

Bake at 400°F for 30 minutes or until golden brown.

Around here, you can get pagach that are all cabbage, all potato, or potato and cheese. Personally, the Soup Lady likes the two fillings mixed together so that you get the goodness of each in every bite.

Surprise Chicken Soup

This recipe is from the vintage cookbook the New Fannie Farmer Boston Cooking School Cookbook, 9th Edition 1951. I guess it is new - good old Fannie was years ahead of her time as this recipe calls for the use of a blender. Aha! here is our explanation: although the original copyright in 1896 was given to Fannie Merritt Farmer, the editions from 1915 to 1929 went to Cora D. Perkins and then to Dexter Perkins from 1930 to 1951 and yet the title page credits Wilma Lord Perkins with the complete revision of this 9th edition.

Wilma opens her preface with a reference to Aunt Fannie's famous cookbook. I am thinking this same pattern of lucky birthright/shrewd marriages is the exactly what happened with The Joy of Cooking. You may recall the Soup Lady's opinion that the latest Joy is diluted, devalued and cheapened by the son-in-law's revisions. Much of the origianl charm is lost along with the taste and interest factors of many of the modern recipes. 16 vinaigrettes, indeed.

But I digress. I do not have the originanl version to compare this revision against but at the very least , this is a trip to 1951. The following recipe is simple but is a huge flavor surprise from a minimum of extra effort. Its got that mid-century innocence concerning chicken skin but of course, that is where the flaovr comes from. I'd like to see what that Rombauer-Becker boy would say to this.

SURPRISE CHICKEN SOUP

Put chicken broth or stock into an electric blender with a few bits of leftover cooked chicken and well-browned skin. Blend until perfectly smooth. Add more broth or top milk until as thin as you like it. Season carefully. Serve hot or chilled.

Vary the flavor by blending with the chicken 1 tablespoon blanched almonds, 1/4 cup sauteed mushrooms or 1/2 cup cooked peas.

And there we have it. The only mystery is what exactly is "top milk"? It's not in any modren dicitonary and the only on-line references that I can find for it are from the U.K., where they apparently like to be as dangerous as possible about their bovine product consumpiton. This article refers to "untreated or green top milk, (raw milk which had not been subjected to any form of heat treatment)..." Could they have meant that as an addition to chicken broth? Well, it was 1951 - I'm not at all on solid ground with this one.

Anyway, try this Chicken Surprise. It is extremely flavorful and can be used in place of plain broth or stock in any recipe that calls for it. The "top milk" thing is up to you - it's fans seem to be rabid about the taste and health benefits (!) of it - the Fugu crowd, I guess - I personally would not even try it.