Your core values must include soup

“Do you have a kinder, more adaptable friend in the food world than soup? Who soothes you when you are ill? Who refuses to leave you when you are impoverished and stretches its resources to give a hearty sustenance and cheer? Who warms you in the winter and cools you in the summer? Yet who also is capable of doing honor to your richest table and impressing your most demanding guests? Soup does its loyal best, no matter what undignified conditions are imposed upon it. You don’t catch steak hanging around when you’re poor and sick, do you?”

—Judith Martin (Miss Manners)

It’s getting cold, if you haven’t noticed, so it’s time to stop pretending that there’s more to life than soup.

We’ve had some lovely times discussing the acronymical canon of ROI and POS and SSF and STD, and whether they describe problems, solutions, or flavors of ice cream. We’ve explored the current theories on the exothermic motivation of employees (hold their feet to the fire). We have shown that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle accurately describes the restaurant server: you can either know where they are, or how fast they are moving, but not both.

But it’s time to let all of that go, and concentrate on core values. Core values—a typical consultant’s phrase, you sneer, adding that a consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you the time. If I were in the mood for it, I might respond that if you can’t see your watch because you’re too busy tearing out your hair, it’s not such a bad thing when someone tells you it’s time to stop.

Not today, though. The light outside is failing, the price of a cold-cranking-amp is rising, the damn election is over, and it’s time to talk about soup. Soup of the evening, soup which damps down the ravell’d sleeve of care. Soup ethereal, soup primordial.

I have a history with soup, as you might have guessed. Most of the soups I grew up with came from a can; the considerable culinary energy in our house went in other directions. Periodically, though, in the wake of some blessed sacrifice that left us its bones, we would get out the big pot—and I, after enough time had passed, would be allowed to make dumplings.

And eating out was a revelation. I was passionate about wonton soup (I miss MSG, don’t you?). I can still remember my first encounter with miso—Sakura Palace, Washington, D.C.—and French onion at Le Provençal was a kid’s delight: wet cheese that you could stretch over your head, flavored with the occasional onion. My introduction to consommé was like finding a leprechaun—you know that pot of gold is there; you can smell it and taste it and it’s almost in your grasp—and it’s gone, just a memory of magic that leaves you dazzled and weeping until the entrée comes to comfort you. And in those innocent days before we knew of sin, I was privileged to eat green turtle soup in a restaurant in Northumbria, an experience that made chimes go off in my head and clearly explained the species’ brush with extinction (I’ve eaten whale, too, which was delicious. It was only in later life that I discovered that I was evil).

Nowadays, my devotion to soup has taken on a few more prosaic attributes. First of all, any food reviewer worth a pillar of salt knows that, in restaurants, by their soups ye shall judge them. This was axiomatic in the days when French cuisine ruled the fine-dining roost: in a brigade kitchen, one of the saucier’s jobs is to make the soups. If your soup has subtlety and grace, your sauces will as well. If your soup’s a clunker, you should leave while you still have cab fare to a pizza joint.

Even for the civilian customer, soup sets the stage for the meal much more than an appetizer can—those are teases; soup is a promise. And here’s the key to its mystery: there are no recipes for soup.

This statement may seem a little odd, especially from someone who just finished a project which involved developing five soup recipes. I’ve written hundreds of them over the years, but not one means diddly in the hands of someone who can’t cook. They will be good, with the steps religiously followed—but only great by accident.

Let me explain. Soup admits of all kinds of stuff. It can be brothy, beany, meaty, so thick you can plant the flag in it or so thin it’s barely a rumor. But everything depends on the quality of the ingredients. Making Pasta e Fagioli? Using base and canned beans? Canned tomatoes? These can all be decent ingredients if you’ve done your homework and sourced them right, but if the recipe tells you to add salt you had better know enough to ignore it. And if you serve it without tasting it—well. There’s good money to be made in insurance sales. Go.

Here’s a recipe for free right out of my personal cookbook; it’s one of my favorite soups. Butternut squash—onions—apples—chicken stock—cream—nutmeg—white pepper—cayenne. Got that? That’s the whole thing. Now, a cook with any experience will tell you that butter should be included, because you don’t boil onions unless you don’t care to taste anything else. You sauté them before they get a bath. But I don’t bother to write this down; anyone who cooks enough will know it. Similarly, no amounts—are you cooking for two or two thousand? And I should presume to tell you how much nutmeg—enough that it’s a breath, not a flavor, okay? It’ll be more with tart onions and rich stock, but you need the freedom to adjust to your ingredients.

You can’t make decent soup without decent taste. Most customers have this intuition in their bones and their buds, even if their culinary lives have been stunted by worshipping the power of formula. Here’s your chance to make believers of them.