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Potato Soup Potato soup is wonderful stuff and it’s more than likely that you’ve never had it. I’m not talking about vichyssoise, which isn’t potato soup at all, rather a buttery, slightly bland mouthful of weight-less seeming luxury for rich folks to begin their gorging, but real potato soup, with no excess of cream or leeks or anything else to crowd out that subtle earthy potato taste or strangely ethereal aroma, the smell of the forest as it waits for rain. The
problem is not that the potato is unknown to soup making, but that it is
all too well known. Its very nature makes a wonderfully complementary
wrap around flavour for almost any other taste you could think of.
Hence, for most cooks, “potato” comes up as “soup base” in every
conceivable shuffle of their culinary deck of cards. Even
in “The Great Potato Cookbook”, written as a paean to “the
incredible potato”, Maria and Jack Scott manage to write a twenty
seven chapter book on soup without once thinking to try their subject
vegetable as the star of the show. Its always potato this or potato that
– carrot, clam, cheese, cucumber cabbage, pumpkin, etc. It staggers
the imagination. Don’t
get me wrong here. I’m not a purist on this matter. Salt pork or
bacon, caraway seeds, savory, marjoram, parsley, dill, butter or chicken
fat, aromatic vegetables, a grating of tangy cheese – there’s
certainly no shortage of seasonings to bring a welcome spritz to a good
potato soup. But a good potato soup needs only a
spritz of flavour. Add too much and the potato retreats to a backup
position for someone else’s show. For
just that reason alone it’s worth starting with as minimal a set of
ingredients imaginable, just to show what a few potatoes can do, given
the spotlight and a little help from a few select friends. Here is the
soup that Andre Simon in his “Concise Encyclopedia of Gastronomy”
calls, “the simplest –and best”. Potato
Soup: Simmer
4 or 5 medium-sized peeled potatoes in a quart of milk, mixed with a
little water for at least an hour. Mash the potatoes; add a snippet or
two of butter and pour into a soup terrine over some little snippets of
stale bread, toasted in butter. Deceptively
simple, this soup – as admirable for what it leaves out as what it
puts in. The stale bread is a nice touch –especially opposed to the
expected snippets of chive – little mouthfuls of buttery crunch that
set off the potatoes own flavours and richness. Most fiddling cooks
would use cream instead of milk and chicken broth instead of water. But
milk adds a classic smoothness to the potato’s delicate creaminess,
which would only be smothered by real cream. And while a broth would
make fine-tasting soup, it would make it less of a potato one. |
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