Great Soup Recipes

All About Soup

It seems to me that cookbooks and cooking shows tend to make soups seem like a difficult thing to make. And that's too bad, because just like the Campbell's folks used to say, "Soup is good food."

Making a Soup is a great way to add more vegetables to your diet. For literally thousands of years, frugal home economists knew that they could stretch a protein and still give their family a filling meal by adding liquid and bits of flavorful vegetables to yesterday's meat. Soups can be sweet or spicy or sour. They can be savory. Some soups are refreshing, some are warming and some can cleanse the palate.

In looking around the Internet and in magazines and cookbooks, I've found that there are lots of different ways to classify soups: by temperature (cold soups versus hot soups), by flavor bases (broths versus stocks versus cream), by ingredient (vegetarian soups versus meat soups), by culture (Asian soups versus French soups).

And that's great--we need a way to separate an admittedly large category into sub-categories. But I find that some of these distinctions (broth-based soup versus stock-based soup, for example) just tend to confuse me. I wrote an article about broths and stocks, and for me, separating soups made from each into different categories doesn't really make much sense to me.

To keep things simple, I'm going to break soups down into two broad categories: thickened soups and un-thickened, or brothy, soups. Pluse I'll add a section for cold soups like Gazpacho.

Keep in mind that you can make any soup thicker by using less liquid, and you can make any soup thinner in consistency by using more liquid. But, there are soups that are made to be thickened--either with a roux, a slurry, pureed vegetables, egg and/or cream--and some that are supposed to be, well, soupy. Soups that you really need to use a spoon to eat as well as some crusty bread to dunk. You know, the kind that makes you want to lift the bowl to your lips to drink the last few spoonfuls.