A cool, surprising first course for Thanksgiving

Freshly returned from an amazing road trip along California’s Pacific Coast Highway, I had planned to regale you with tales of fabulous food and hairpin turns. That will have to wait ’til next week. I suddenly remembered I’d promised you Marion’s Sweet Potato Vichyssoise, a Thanksgiving tradition at our house, in time for that most food-centric of holidays. Marion will actually give you two recipes today—the Vichyssoise and the homemade chicken stock that makes it so good. For a little taste of California, check out my WTF post after the soup course. Oh. And if you’re looking for another non-traditional [except in our household] side dish for Thanksgiving, be sure to check out Marion’s delicious take on kasha from last year.

A bowl of this soup looks like a beautiful harvest moon glowing on your table. The original of this recipe appeared in The Four Seasons Cookbook, still one of my most beloved cookbooks of all time. Elegant in design, full of inspiring, demanding recipes and gorgeous photos, it foreshadowed our current era of high-concept coffee table cookbooks. I usually figure that if a cookbook gives us one recipe that lasts, then that cookbook is worth my while. The Four Seasons Cookbook gave me several that remain in our rotation even now, and I still turn to it from time to time to admire its lovely photos and, honestly, to gape at the now-vanished world of daffy culinary aspiration that it represents—especially the panoply of things crammed inside other things: Stuffed Legs of Baby Lamb en Brioche! Whole Trout in Souffle! Mousse of Ham in Whole Peaches! [I cannot think of another cookbook that comments, with a straight face, of a very busy dish that includes lobster and lobster sauce, “It will make a pleasantly spectacular addition to your repertoire of chafing-dish cookery.”] But even if time has not been kind to this book, I still love it, and still remember that once I, too, longed to make a Croquembouche Bruno.

That book’s version of Sweet Potato Vichyssoise was based on beef stock and also called for celery, onion, and loads of butter. This one is lighter in approach. If anything, this recipe is so simple that I’m almost embarrassed by it. The central thing about to know, though, is that you have to make it with homemade stock. With so few ingredients, each one has to stand up for itself, and that’s all there is to it. Store-bought canned “broth” or the liquid delivery system for salt and fat that comes in a box just won’t do. Below you’ll find my recipe for homemade chicken stock. But first, the Sweet Potato Vichyssoise, an elegant, delicious first course for your Thanksgiving dinner.

Sweet Potato Vichyssoise
6 to 8 first course servings

6 cups of homemade chicken stock [see recipe below]
2 pounds of sweet potatoes
1 cup cream or half and half
Fresh chives, cut fine, or green scallion tops, cut very fine

Peel the sweet potatoes and cut them into small pieces.

Heat the chicken stock. When it is simmering, add the sweet potatoes, return the liquid to a simmer, and cook until the sweet potatoes are very soft. At this point, salt the soup carefully to taste. [See Kitchen Notes.]

Cool the soup. You may decant it in a bowl if you wish, or move the pot into the refrigerator, but it is essential to cool the soup thoroughly at this point. Once it is well cooled [see Kitchen Notes], process it in a blender or food processor until it is uniformly smooth and rather thick. Work in batches if you need to.

Once the soup is entirely puréed, pour it into a large container, cover and refrigerate until you are ready to serve it. You can make it up to a day ahead. At the point when you are about to serve the soup, stir in the cream.

Ladle the cold soup into individual bowls. Choose a bowl that will show off the pretty pale-coral color of the soup. As you see from the photo, we use pink Manhattan glass bowls. Simple white ones or clear glass bowls would be beautiful too. Garnish with the chives or scallions, and serve.

Now here’s the homemade chicken stock, the key to the success of the vichyssoise.

A hearty, hot soup for chilly nights

Broth is all well and good in soups, but I like my soups crowded. Even as a kid, I would scarf down all the noodles and little cubes of chicken in my Campbell’s Chicken Noodle and leave a bowlful of broth, aggravating my mom and missing out on the liquid benefits of soup. Now that I’m all grown up, I can appreciate a nice slurpy bowl of miso soup on occasion. But crowded soups—soups packed with vegetables and chunks of meat and maybe some noodles—are still what I really crave.

This soup fits the bill perfectly, a true meal in a bowl. It’s got lentils and a whole host of vegetables, including spinach. It’s got nice chunky bites of chicken. And it’s got spices—curry powder, cumin, red pepper and fresh ginger—to fire it up a bit and make it as interesting as it is satisfying. For the curry, I used Hot Curry Powder from The Spice House. Any Madras curry is a good choice for its heat.

It’s easy to make this vegetarian too. Just leave out the chicken and use all water or vegetable stock in place of the chicken stock.

Speaking of chicken stock, I lucked out big time. Marion made some homemade stock recently to freeze and I nabbed some of that. Just before Thanksgiving, we’ll post her recipe for chicken stock as part of a cold sweet potato soup that has become a delicious tradition of our Thanksgiving dinner. If you don’t have homemade stock for this lentil soup, be sure to use low sodium chicken broth. You can always add salt later—you can’t take it out.

With soup season in full swing, this crowded lentil soup is a hearty, flavorful meal with enough heat for the chilliest night. It’s also relatively easy to get on the table after a busy day.

A few simple ingredients take center stage

Two weeks ago, I wrote about soup. Last week, beans. So this week, naturally enough, it’s bean soup.

This particular soup came out of a failed attempt at a promising sounding recipe that just didn’t deliver. I’ve talked in the past about my overflowing, unkempt binders of recipes. As often happens, I was flipping through them looking for one recipe when I found another, for Tomato Bean Soup with Pasta. I love cannellini beans and I thought they would have more of a starring role in this soup. But the recipe turned out to be too busy, with too many ingredients all vying for attention—the white beans that caught my interest originally and tomatoes and pasta and either swiss chard or kale. In the end, the results were only okay, with no one flavor asserting itself.

Still, the idea of a soup like this one should have been was intriguing enough that it started me searching for others. As usual, I found a couple/few recipes that all gave me ideas for what I ended up creating.

The original recipe called for either Swiss chard or kale. Both are cruciferous vegetables, meaning they contain cancer-fighting antioxidants. They also contain healthy doses of of vitamins A and C as well as iron. Chard is a member of the beet family. Its flavor has been described as spinachlike—mild and earthy.

Kale is a mild-tasting member of the cabbage family. It has been called the archetypal winter green because it prefers cold climates—it will survive even if left in the ground all winter—and its flavor is actually enhanced by a winter frost. Both chard and kale have a slightly bitter undertone that adds depth to their flavors.

Marion has also used escarole in soups for that same slightly bitter touch. Any of these greens—as well as spinach—would work well in this soup, I think.

Chilled soup and a cool borrowed memory

How has this happened? Summer is almost gone, and we haven’t gotten around to making any cold soups. No gazpacho. None of Marion’s delicious attempts at recreating the cold cucumber bisque we used to get at Café Balaban in St. Louis—she never matches our fading memories of it [it's been years since we've had it or they've even served it], but she always creates something summery and fresh. So when I saw a simple, authentic sounding recipe for vichyssoise over at Katie’s Thyme for Cooking, I had to give it a try.

One reason the idea of vichyssoise appealed to me, I have to admit, was the opening of Anthony Bourdain’s highly entertaining book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. He talks about his very first realization that food was more than mere fuel. Even though I read it back when it first came out in 2000, this passage stays with me:

My first indication that food was something other than a substance one stuffed in one’s face when hungry—like filling up at a gas station—came after fourth grade in elementary school. It was on a family vacation to Europe, on the Queen Mary, in the cabin-class dining room. There’s a picture somewhere: my mother in her Jackie O sunglasses, my younger brother and I in our painfully cute cruisewear, boarding the big Cunard ocean liner, all of us excited about our first transatlantic voyage, our first trip to my father’s ancestral homeland, France.

It was the soup.

It was cold.

As Bourdain explains, it was something of a discovery for someone whose entire experience with soup to this point had consisted of Campbell’s. Here’s how he describes that first taste of vichyssoise:

I remember everything about the experience: the way our waiter ladled it from a silver tureen into my bowl; the crunch of tiny chopped chives he spooned on as a garnish; the rich, creamy taste of leek and potato; the pleasurable shock, the surprise that it was cold.

Bourdain realizes that vichyssoise has become an old warhorse of a menu selection, but says the very name “still has a magical ring to it.” Good enough for me. I had to make some.

But first, I did a little reading. Turns out this most French-sounding soup was created in New York in 1917. By a Frenchman, though—Louis Diat, head chef at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. He based it on a warm potato and leek soup, a classic French soup that he made from a recipe his mother had given him. Julia Child’s version of this traditional Potage Parmentier in Mastering the Art of French Cooking is simplicity itself. Of course, much of French cooking is deceptively, elegantly simple.

One variation on this basic soup includes watercress. The slightly peppery crisp taste of this herb sounded like it would the perfect addition to this creamy, cold soup.

“Hot soup, comin’ through!”

The title to this post is a direct quote from my high school swim teacher and coach of the school’s swim team, Coach Otto. It was what passed for etiquette inside his grey crewcut-topped head. Constantly working in the damp, cold [even in warm weather] pool room, Coach Otto had hot soup every day in the cafeteria wihout fail. And every day, he cleared the path before him on his way to the faculty dining area, steaming soup in hand, with his own inimitable version of, “Excuse me, please”… “Hot soup, comin’ through!”

The weather’s been a real roller coaster ride this spring, especially temperaturewise. During one of those Six Flags Over Freezing My Butt Off spells recently, I started jonesing for some soup [for my non-U.S. readers, Six Flags is an amusement park chain---Six Flags Over Mid-America, Six Flags Over Texas, etcetera---that prides itself on having the scariest roller coasters around; they actually budget for a certain number of injury lawsuit settlements every year, rather than slow their coasters down]. But back to soup, I wanted something hearty and filling and warming. But it also had to be quick—it was a weekday, and I was at work.

That soup can even be quick was a revelation to me—and a recent one at that. I had totally bought into the notion that soup had to take hours to make. It was something you started in the morning and occasionally stirred, tended to, added to and fussed over throughout the day. And while there are plenty of soups that do indeed take this kind of time, there are also plenty that don’t. I was stunned and amazed the first time I saw a soup recipe whose total cooking time was in the neighborhood of 15 minutes or so.

In the interest of total honesty, many quick soups—this one included—depend on pre-made ingredients like miso paste or cans of broth, tomatoes or beans. Otherwise, they’d be slow soups.

But all’s fair in love, war and soup. So one recent cold afternoon, I went to Epicurious and searched for quick, hearty soups. I found Creole Chicken and Okra Gumbo. The name was promising, but when I looked at the recipe, I was less enthusiastic. Have you ever read recipes that sound too simple, too stripped down to possibly be good? That was this one in letters five miles high. Only a handful of ingredients and most of those either canned or frozen or somehow processed.

Still, it had okra in it, always a plus in my book. And I reminded myself that the lion’s share of really good New Orleans creole/cajun cuisine makes heavy use of processed foods and herbs and spices. Looking at cookbooks from the region, you’d be justified in suspecting that half the ships you see docked at the Port of New Orleans must be hauling in garlic powder or onion powder. I also reminded myself that I really, really wanted some soup, and I wanted it fast. This soup would be good enough.

Only it was better than “good enough”—really good, in fact. Maybe not omigod-company-dinner good, but flavorful and hearty and satisfying, with just the right amount of zing from the hot pepper sauce. And on an unseasonably cold spring night, it was exactly what we wanted.