Bumper Edition: Soup Special

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Well, hello! Welcome to the Bumper Edition Soup Spectacular!

This has been the single biggest endeavour since I started writing this newsletter. What a fantastic time it has been, and I hope you will find it worth it and also you can bookmark this page for the next time you think: I am very cold and the heating does not come on for another four hours/three weeks and I have to think of something delicious to make for dinner. Here are, and I say this advisedly, twenty of the best soups on the whole internet.¹

This is basically all my thoughts on soup, compiled. You can scroll down fast to the Soups Themselves², but I think maybe you will have a really nice time if you just get settled in for mega-cosy soup chats. The comments will be open and I will be in them talking about soup. OK.

I cannot tell you how many soup recipes I have tested for this Bumper Soup Edition. It is more than you would think. It is much, much more than we can possibly eat, especially given that my partner is not that fond of soup and can’t eat beans. My freezer is so full of soup it will not close without a fight.

Here’s your first tip, hopefully the first of many in this bumper soup edition: should you ever need to make a lot of soup/stew/ whatever in advance, the soup goes in a Ziploc bag; the Ziploc bag is laid flat on a baking sheet; the baking sheet goes into the freezer. When the soup is frozen solid and perfectly flat (!), remove the baking sheet, and STACK atop your other frozen sheets of soup. This may be a thing you already do but it’s been revolutionary to me because then the Tupperwares aren’t forever all in the freezer. Also, because more things fit in! And you can also then just break off enough soup for you, and defrost just that broken off piece, thereby negating the need to repeatedly reheat it and then panic about botulism.

My freezer is full of flat-pack soup, and it’s very satisfying. So, yes: every recipe here has been tested. I have notes on all of them. They have beaten out approximately 30 others after the testing stage, and approximately….450 others at the “reading the recipe, making notes on the recipe, running the recipe through in my head” stage. I have been blown away by how many soups everyone has sent me and how wonderful so many of them are. Thank you all so, so much. There were so, so many good soups. So I have had to be totally ruthless.

I had three key criteria for choosing these soups.

First, the toughest one: the recipe had to be in a link that anyone could access. This was because with someone’s homemade recipe, I knew I would want to tweak, and edit, and recipe test a whole bunch more, and then that person might be offended or hurt; and also because if this post contained twenty long-form recipes, it would be too long for Substack. This was a horrible rule to have because so many people sent me beautiful family secrets, but the more I worked on this soup project the more I realised it was necessary to make this work without sinking the ship entirely. My hope is that I will be able to tell you about some of those family secrets in due course, in posts of their own…especially the salmon and dill Godmother Soup, and Tash Frisco’s lobby, which is a whole blog by itself.

(For total clarity: I broke this rule twice. I’m sorry. More on that below.)

Back to it: so, links only, mostly, for ease³.

Then, second, and the key to all good soup: the soup had to be more than the sum of its parts. This is the thing with soup, right? It had to be more than the sum of its parts. Some perfectly nice soups are not on this list because they taste exactly like you would expect them to taste from the raw ingredients, and not— for instance— better than if you hadn’t soup-ed them up. Like: a butternut squash soup with cream and salt and nutmeg in it that tastes, ultimately, of creamy, salty, nutmeggy butternut squash? Delicious! Sure! But a) you can do that on your own, without a recipe, and b) according to my files, every single person who reads this newsletter already has that exact recipe, and each of you believes yours is the very best one. Go with God! The soups here, then, had to be more than that. Not better, exactly, but more. There had to be something surprising or special or notable. There had to be some little alchemy in there that made it feel like a magic trick when you ladled it out or blitzed it up, you know?

Which was really the gateway to the third, and most vital criterion: after all the soup, the freezers full of soup, the stacks and stacks of it, soup for lunch and soup for dinner…I still had to be thinking about that soup in particular.

I still had to be thinking: maybe we could have that soup for dinner tonight? The soup had to be so good that after a long day of making soups, I had to want to make an extra-curricular bowl of this soup. I had to still be excited about this soup in a sea of soup. These are those soups.

These are the soups that my recipe testers have taken to their hearts and made repeatedly (even as I beg them to please, for the love of God, make any of the other fifty soups on the longlist that all need testing, we have no more room for soup, someone help me out here!!!). In some cases, and I will tell you which ones these are, they are the soups that the Soup Hating Man has actively requested I make again. Which is staggering as he truly is not a soup fan.

OK, enough chatting. Onto the Soup Stakes. Spoons ready, kids.