S.O.U.P.S. : Seattle's Own Undeniably Perfect Soups

Rating:
Summary: Seattle's Best Soups
Review: Hopvine has some of Seattle's best lunches, in my opinion, with hearty, healthy sometimes-vegetarian fare that goes way WAY beyond "pub food." The seasonal wasabi spring salad is to die for, and the artichoke/gouda sandwich is fantastic. Don't get me started on the soups: the amazing chilled strawberry soup in the summer, the creamy potato leek with lavender in the winter, the miso soup that's more like a meal.

And now, imagine my delight to see that Hopvine's chef, Michael Congdon, has released a whole book full of his amazing soups! Michael has an amazing concept of taste...once, when I sat by myself sipping his vichyssois, he came by my table and whispered conspiratorially "the taste will really pop with a little of this hot sauce." I do not like hot sauce. I lean towards un-spicy food and had never (seriously: NEVER EVER) added hot sauce to anything. But the way Michael suggested it, I figured I'd give it a shot. Just a tiny little dot of hot sauce on the top of the cold, creamy soup. And that tiny dot totally transformed the soup. There were many more dots after that, and I learned to trust Michael's advice absolutely.

And now there's this book! The whole first chunk is all about spices and tools, and might seem old hat for experienced chefs, but for culinary dullards like myself, it's sheer genius. And the soups! Dear god. I cannot wait to try some of these. Bonus: there are salad, cookie, and other non-soupy recipes in the back.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent cookbook, beyond-excellent soups!
Review: Soup is my favorite food! After eating at the Hopvine and enjoying the soups for quite some time, I was overjoyed when Michael Congdon brought many of those soups to us in the cookbook. I got my copy in the first week it was available, and made my favorite - the Southwestern Pumpkin - shortly thereafter. Delicious! I've also made the wonderful Potato Leek and the White Bean with Caramelized Shallots and Rum. A friend of mine purchased a copy of S.O.U.P.S. for me for Christmas, not knowing I already had one... but hey, it just meant that she now has a copy of her own. :) She and her guy made the Moroccan Lentil soup and loved it! That's going to be what's in my pot next, too. Michael, thank you so much for sharing your recipes with us!

Rating:
Summary: Shut Up and Eat
Review: The number of Seattlites who greet new residents and visitors to the city with the statement "Go to Capitol Hill and eat soup!" is unnerving, but those who take the advice aren't disappointed.

Michael Congdon, the talented, appealingly edgey, and occasionally irrascible cook at Seattle's Hopvine pub eventually wearied of being besieged for soup recipes and caved to pressure to write a book.

S.O.U.P.S. is the happy result. The book is as unpretentious and charming as the pub and its tattooed skinhead chef, but don't be fooled - it offers an extraordinary variety of well-written formulae for seriously tasty soups. (The "Butternut Squash with Pears and Cranberries" on page 125 is my current favorite, but ask me again tomorrow.)

Five star cooking from a venue that can't be bothered with stars. Now shut up and eat.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Soup Recipes. Less than Excellent Editing. Buy It
Review: `S.O.U.P.S' by Michael Congdon, with a subtitle of `Seattle's Own Undeniably Perfect Soups' reinforces the picture we in less benighted metropolis that Seattle is challenging New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Houston as a major national presence in good food service. It must be all those Microsoft business lunches! This book is a welcome; quality addition to the literature on soup making and it is notable for both its great accomplishments and its weaknesses.

Good soup books seem to come in two flavors. The `upper tier' of books by major American culinary writers and figures such as Barbara Kafka, James Peterson, and Jasper White, published by Wiley and Scribners cover all the classics and the authors' variations on classic recipes. The lower tier by, for example, Paulette Mitchell, the `Daily Soup' chef/owners, and our current author Conned, published by new, small publishers such as Hyperion, Chronicle, and Sasquatch Books present collections of soup recipes which are honed to a fine edge in small restaurants over a long time.

The most obvious question is whether Herr Congdon's soups live up to their billing as `perfect soups'. My humble opinion is that the soups produced by these recipes are very, very good, at the cost of a level of effort that may be beyond most home cooks on most days of the week. Thus, what Congdon has done is to give us a collection of excellent recipes for special occasions. He has enhanced his presentation by giving us the recipes by season, and I find no violations to his suggestions for cooking seasonally. His recipes are very similar to soups done in New York's `The Daily Soup Cookbook', where every soup is meant to be the center of a complete meal. There are practically no soups like some in books by Kafka and Peterson that may be nothing more than a broth and two or three greens and a pistu garnish. Thus, most recipes except for the summer cold fruit soups have a lot of ingredients on top of the ingredients needed to produce the vegetable or chicken stock. Most of his soups also make great use of both mild and hot chiles (more on this later), which distinguish Congdon's recipes from many others. If you happen to be a chile head, then I suggest you drop what you are doing and order a copy of this book.

In addition to the 69 soup recipes, the book gives an especially nice introduction to soup making equipment, herbs and spices used in these soup recipes, soup making methods, recipes for soup accompaniments, and recipes for the three major soup stocks, vegetable, chicken, and fish. The two books to which I am comparing this volume each give similar material. One consideration is that both `Daily Soup' and Congdon's recipes both tend to give restaurant sized batches of 12 or more cups of soup, although there are several which deliver between four and eight cup servings. When you are dealing with a dozen or more ingredients, scaling this down to half becomes quite a challenge in this non-metric world of measurements. And, unlike Ms. Mitchell's `A Beautiful Bowl of Soup', Mr. Congdon does not systematically give recommendations on refrigerator and freezer shelf life for these soups. But, as Ms. Mitchell's book is limited to vegetarian dishes, the real competition is in a comparison between Congdon and the `Daily Soup' crew.

One thing that struck me throughout Mr. Congdon's recipes is that the length of cooking time for many recipes is longer than for many other writers. By far the most dramatic example of this is the recipe for chicken stock that calls for overnight simmering of the stockpot. I have read dozens of chicken stock recipes, and there may be only one other I can remember which takes it out to such great lengths, and, this was not from a recognized culinary expert. I really like the fact that the vegetables are cooked and removed before the marathon session, but even this step is relatively long, as I have seen expert opinions which say that vegetables in stocks should be cooked not much more than an hour or they will cloud the stock. Even more experts state that cooking fish for stocks should be limited to one hour, while Mr. Congdon recommends `no less than two hours'.

One thing that surprises me is Mr. Congdon's use of the food processor rather than either a Waring style or immersion style blender. Most authorities recommend a blender over a food processor for soups. And, I think a glass blender beaker is a lot easier to clean than the plastic food processor chamber. It may also have been useful for the author to specify a china cap (chinois) for filtering finely pureed soups, unless he found he painted himself into a corner by criticizing Emeril Lagasse for using a lot of equipment to produce his TV Network soups.

My biggest problem with Mr. Congdon's writing may be due to no trained copy editor at Sasquatch Press, as strange statements asking us to melt our olive oil and dissolve flour so it can coat ingredients make me worry that the final text may simply not have been adequately proofread. This probably contributed to Mr. Congdon's highly inconsistent use of the terms chile and peppers, where he goes against standard practice in the culinary world in calling fresh items `peppers' and dried items `chiles'.

If you really only want one book for thick, high quality soups, the `Daily Soup' volume may be the better choice for its cleaner writing and typesetting, but if you really like your soup and enjoy every recipe you can get your hands on, then this book is for you. I would only suggest you consider simpler recipes for chicken and vegetable stocks. For chicken, especially, I prefer the recipes that either use carcasses or save the meat for other dishes using poached chicken.

Highly recommended if you really like soups.