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(More customer reviews)`An Exaltation of Soups' is author Patricia Solley's published scrapbook of stories, proverbs, wit, wisdom, and recipes about soup. This is not my opinion. The author states this fact as clearly as you may please in her introduction. The author is far more of a researcher than she is a culinary professional, as she is chief of Research Communications and Public Relations for the FBI. Yes, that's the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington.
In the spirit of being much more about the lore of soups than a culinary exploration as you will find in culinary specialists James Peterson and Barbara Kafka, the recipes are not organized by season or ingredient or thick versus thin or smooth versus chunky. They are organized by use. How do we human inventors of cooking over 10,000 years ago use this food preparation called soup?
The first Part of four (4) is `Soup Basics'. It does not deal with soup cooking so much as with a speculative history of the origins of soup, a collection of soup proverbs and clichés, a small collection of stories about soup, and recipes for soup stocks. This includes seven basic stock recipes plus a technique for clarifying stock and a technique for concentrating stock. While this collection has several stocks you may not easily find elsewhere such as a Hungarian chicken stock and a Japanese fish stock, all the recipes are relatively simple. Simpler, for sure, than what you may find from the CIA (Culinary Institute of America, not the foreign colleague of the FBI) textbook or cooking experts such as Jeremiah Tower or Judy Rodgers. They are much simpler than expert soup specialists such as Seattle's Michael Congdon, the author of the new recipe collection, `S.O.U.P.S'. But then, this book is not so much about cooking soups as soup's place in the goings and comings of various human communities.
The second Part is `Soups of Passage'. Here is where the book comes into its own, as we are given recipes for various important events in our lives, or at least in the lives of members of some very important cultures. The four `passages' represented here are birth, confirmation, marriage, and death. It is no surprise that the largest selection by far are those recipes developed to celebrate marriage, including the famous Italian wedding soup with meatballs. Oddly, I seem to recall that the name of this soup with meatballs has less to do with a human wedding as it does with the wedding of ingredients.
The third Part is `Soups of Purpose'. Here, unlike the preceding and following chapters, the soup recipes are constructed to accomplish a specific culinary objective, so that there is a connection between ingredients and cooking techniques and the soup's use other than simply tradition. The most famous of this breed is the `Les Halle Onion Soup', which I had the pleasure of sampling at a Les Halle bistro in Paris at 5:00 AM, along with the traditional glass of red wine. The author recounts a tale from Harold Pinter about the playwright's ending a night of carousing in Paris at a similar open air market bistro with fellow playwright Samuel Beckett, who was kind enough to let Pinter slip into a slumber with head on table while Beckett retrieved a large glass of water and bicarbonate of soda. Unfortunately, Ms. Solley says nothing about the tradition of red wine with the onion soup.
The last and longest Part is `Soups of Piety and Ritual'. Unlike the second chapter, these are all soups dealing with a particular date or holiday that occurs every year. The holidays so honored are New Years Day, St. Tavy's Day (represented by a leek soup celebrating a Welsh saint), Eastertide (including soups for the carnival at the beginning of Lent, Lent, Holy Week, and Easter, Jewish Festivals (including soups for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, and Passover), Islamic Festivals (Ramadan and Eid Al Fitr), Christmas, and Kwanzaa. I am really pleased to see recipes for Islamic festivals appear in an English book for general audiences. This is the second such book I have seen. The first is Nigella Lawson's new book `Feast'. It is great fun to see how important the soup borsht is, as at least two different recipes, one Russian and one Jewish, appear in the book.
Aside from the fun to be found in reading the sidebars, headnotes, and other commentary about soup, the most useful function of this book would be as a source of recipes to fit various events in one's life. Many writers make a great deal of how food brings people together over the dinner table. This benefit is doubled if one can prepare dishes behind which there are centuries of tradition. While bread can probably outdo soup as a type of food that is most heavily wrapped in tradition, soup certainly seems to have the edge on most other types of cooking. What makes this especially useful in this context is that almost all the recipes are relatively easy. This being the case, there is some chance that these are not the very best recipes possible for these dishes. But, the book has still served its purpose if you are looking for an Italian Lenten soup and you find `Minestrone di magro'. If you are not satisfied with Ms. Solley's recipe, you can always fetch a copy of a recipe from Marcella Hazan or Lydia Bastianich. At least if you don't have a cookbook for foods of the Middle East, you at least have these five Arab influenced recipes for Ramadan.
One feature where Ms. Solley really missed the boat was in her not including a bibliography of other books on soup recipes. The book ends with all her literary credits in place, but no citations of good books on Soup. So, only four stars for this omission and to alert potential buyers that this book is more about lore than about gourmet cooking.
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Throughout history and around the world, soup has been used to bring comfort, warmth, and good health. A bowl of soup can symbolize so much—celebrations, major life passages, and the everyday. Inspired by Patricia Solley's website, SoupSong.com, and organized according to function—soups to heal the sick, recover from childbirth, soothe a hangover, entice the object of your affection, and mark special occasions and holidays—An Exaltation of Soups showcases more than a hundred of the best soup recipes of all time, including: • Festive Wedding Soup with Meatballs from Italy• Egyptian Fava Bean Soup, made to give strength to convalescents• Creamy Fennel Soup with Shallots and Orange Spice from Catalonia—perfect for wooing a lover• Hungarian "Night Owl" Soup, designed to chase a hangover• Spicy Pumpkin and Split Pea Soup from Morocco, served to celebrate Rosh Hashanah• Tanzanian Creamy Coconut-Banana Soup for KwanzaaSpiced with soup riddles, soup proverbs, soup poetry, and informative sidebars about the lore and legends of soup through the ages, An Exaltation of Soups is a steaming bowl of goodness that is sure to satisfy.
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