If osso bucco is a complex symphony, baked alaska is a frivolous operetta and a jam doughnut is a song by Cliff Richard, then a bowl of fine soup is a fugue. The best soup unites ingredients that act beautifully together; separate but always enhancing and echoing each other, just like a fugue. As I […]
Tag: soup
When Colours Run Riot
There was a phase in the 1970s when interior design ran riot. I remember my grandpa announcing proudly that he’d decorated the walls of his small front room with four wildly different wallpapers and picked out the woodwork in egg-yolk yellow. I thought of my grandpa as I walked around David Hockney’s new exhibition A […]
Still Life with Soup
Few things give me as much pleasure as a still life painting. Giorgio Morandi, Alice Mumford, Ben Nicholson, Edouard Vuillard all do something magical to a jug of milk, a white vase and a pot of jam and turn the mundane and everyday into something magnificent. I even like the term itself – ‘still life’ […]
Spinach and Sorrel Soup, The Sonnet
Soup is one of the best foods ever invented, so why are most of the references to it in literature unashamedly dismal? Soup is usually a metaphor for hard times, dour landladies and dubious chefs. The 20th century American author Margaret Halsey captured the ‘sad soup genre’ perfectly when she said that the broth she […]
DIY Miso Soup
I’ve argued for years that if children’s books can have illustrations, why shouldn’t novels for adults? When Jonathan Safran Foer published Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close I felt vindicated. It has drawings, typographical experiments, photographs, a flip-book …and it’s magnificent. Safran Foer has just outdone himself. I’ve spent the evening reading his latest work Tree […]
Celeriac Soup with Apple and Chestnut
Reading Paul Auster’s novel The Brooklyn Follies, I collided with a disturbing idea. According to Auster’s thwarted character Tom, we’ve entered a new era, an era of the ‘post-past age.’ Tom elaborates that the ‘post-past’ means ‘The now. And also the later. But no more dwelling on the then.’ Could that be true? Are we […]
Poems, Roses and Butterbean Soup
I was entranced to hear that the British poet Ian McMillan used to tuck a poem into his children’s packed lunches before school each morning. I’d pay good money for someone to do that for me, although I did once have a boyfriend who used to put a rose in my handbag every time I […]
Green gazpacho with borage ice
Going through security for my flight from New York to Virginia I noticed a sign that said ‘no snow-globes may be taken on this flight.’ It sounded such a fanciful idea to even think of taking a snow-globe flying that I immediately wanted to. And that got me thinking about how to make an edible […]