What? No Duck Soup?
A Geezer’s Notebook, By Jim Foster
We begin the actual dinner lessons, the nitty-gritty shall we say, and if you are cooking outdoors and the wind is blowing, more gritty than nitty.
Soups
There is nothing quite as satisfying as a good bowl of soup – I mean other than the sex thing. Since you will never have any sex in the few years you have left; there is nothing quite as satisfying as a good bowl of soup.
Not only can soup be delicious and nutritious; almost any bozo can make it – even you. Soups are served hot (Caliente) or cold (Gazpacho). In your case, living in a lean-to or a hovel/shack, it will likely start off piping hot and within seconds become cold. In the bitter winter months (anywhere between October and May), your soup will almost instantly fall to a temperature where it must be eaten in chunks.
For some reason most soup begins with a chicken broth base, which I am sure is disturbing to the chicken population. Jewish cooks in particular include chicken broth in an infinite number of their traditional recipes and have done so for centuries. There is even a school of thought that suggests that it wasn’t an apple that caused Adam and his bride to be evicted from the Garden of Eden, but a particularly spicy chicken soup base the serpent spread on Eve. Just why the Lord was upset has never been explained, but it may have been that the rooster involved was a family pet.
Chicken soup has long been known to have remarkable healing qualities and appears to have been directly responsible for curing several plagues and pestilences threatening the Hebrew population. In Galoshes 6-14, a broth cooked up by Sadie Cohen and served to Rameses II is said to have softened his anti-Semitic views. After an all night bargaining session, the Pharaoh agreed to give the brick makers and the straw gatherers a 10 minute paid coffee break – although he refused to spring for bagels.
Since it is an essential ingredient in almost all soups, we would be remiss if we did not begin this section with a recipe for a tasty chicken broth.
Chicken Broth (makes 1000cc , about one large wine bottle, full)
Place a chicken in pot or pail. (Chicken should be dead and plucked)
Fill pot or pail with clean water, if available (although it will eventually be boiled so just as long as it looks reasonable clear).
Add salt to taste, about a box (for people on low-sodium diets, a half box). Cover and place over fire.
Boil until broth becomes sludge. Add water and boil again.
Mushroom Soup
Ingredients:
An onion
A mushroom
A dipper of chicken broth
Method: Boil a long time.
- A word of caution about faux-mushrooms. Some members of the mushroom family, namely toadstools, have been much maligned by so-called health professionals. Very few people have actually died from cooking any of the above – swallowing maybe. On the other hand, one should be very careful what one picks up off his/her lawn – particularly if one has a dog. If you should find a mushroom-shaped plant and are unsure whether it is edible or a deadly poison, it is better to err on the side of caution. Offer a bite to a friend or a passing neighbour. If he/she keels over and starts frothing at the mouth, hit the mushroom with a stick a few times before taking a bite yourself.
Chowders
Almost every seafood restaurant has its own chowder recipe, whether it be fish-based or any of several members of the crustacean family, almost all will kill you in seconds. There are very few chefs alive today who can actually tell with reasonable accuracy whether a shellfish is edible or whether the little sucker is a one-way ticket to the Great Beyond and capable of wiping out every living soul on the planet. Of the few remaining experts, they are dying off on an average of one a day. By this coming Friday, we will be down to one, a blind Japanese sushi chopper with the dry heaves.
Manhattan Fish Chowder
Ingredients:
A fish
An onion
A dipper of chicken broth
Method: Boil a long time, in Manhattan.
Manhattan Clam Chowder
Ingredients:
A clam
An onion
A dipper of chicken broth
Method: Boil a long time, in Manhattan
Boston Clam Chowder
Ingredients:
A clam
An onion
A dipper of chicken Broth
Method: Boil a long time in – well you get the idea.
So much for the more exotic soups. Granted, they will certainly impress your dinner guests with their complex and enchanting flavours, especially if you have taken the time to gut the fish or clam and float an interesting garnish on top – like a sprig of parsley or a leaf of some sort. But it will not be the chowders that will keep you going through the long winter months. It will be that perennial favourite, Granny’s Homemade Vegetable-Beef-Like Soup, sustaining you when the icy blasts from the arctic rip through your little shack or lean-to.
I’m sure even now you are thinking back to the halcyon days of your childhood when you sat by your granny’s cook stove eagerly awaiting a bowl from a steaming black pot that had been bubbling away for weeks and weeks on the old wood stove. Think back to those cold winter mornings on the farm when you watched the dear old soul chucking those vitamin enriched potato peelings into the pot, the damned zucchini and that stringy beefsteak that just wouldn’t go down.
Nothing was wasted back on the old farm. It if it was edible, or might have been at some time in the distant past, or possibly sometime in the future if boiled long enough, it went into the pot.
You never saw granny pitching out mouldy crusts of bread or wizened-up carrots or potato eyes, in they went. Surely you must remember climbing up on a kitchen chair and peeking into that bottomless black cauldron. Do you mind trying to guess what that was that just rolled over in the foam? Was it a hunk of turnip, a soup bone, or could it have been granddad’s long underwear or Aunt Liza’s missing shoe? No matter, everything would eventually dissolve and add its own distinct flavour.
Hovel-Made Vegetable Beef-like Soup (Boeuf-possible et Legumes)
Ingredients: Just about anything you can lay your hands on that may have at some time grown somewhere.
A quantity of animal parts (the less said the better)
A dipper of chicken stock or beef stock (see recipe for chicken broth and substitute one cow -feathers removed – for one chicken)
A water – no quantity given. Just keep topping up.
Salt to taste.
Cover and boil several weeks. Don’t be afraid to experiment with various wild grasses, herbs and spices. There is almost nothing you can do that won’t improve this soup. Remember, your granny made this stuff for years and several members of your family came through OK – even your brother, Arnold (Arnold is currently being used for medical experiments at the University of Toronto).
Next week we begin Fine Dining.
(Image Supplied)
