I don't claim to be much more than a passable cook. I can make some tasty meals and, if it's any indication of latent talent, I don't need to follow a recipe most of the time. Still, I spend little time honing my skills. But for a glance at an occasional food magazine or cookbook and watching the odd episode of Bravo's Top Chef Masters on television, I only polish my chops by playing around in the kitchen, trying out new things largely to alleviate boredom with meals I already can prepare in my sleep. I learn what works and what doesn't by trial and error.
In recent years, my greatest learning experiences have come from making something so basic, so banal, that I feel almost silly taking it as seriously as I do. But then, I didn't always make a good soup.
For years, I simply went through the motions, boiling down, say, a turkey carcass and rendering stock into which I dumped some vegetables, some turkey meat and a bit of salt and pepper. I just boiled it all down until the vegetables were soft and served it. Except for its virtue of being homemade—homemade, as any kid ever showed up to a Halloween party in a homemade costume soon learns, isn't always a virtue—I'd have rather have had soup from a can.
But I like making meals that you can make while doing something else, particularly on weekends. After having had enough chili and slow-roasted chicken, cooked half the day in a 250-degree oven, I ventured back into soups, this time with conviction. Surely I could make more than a bland, somewhat gamey broth filled with mushy chunks of carrot and turnip.
My first epiphany came as the result of having less than I usually have to work with. After rendering my usual chicken stock, I went rummaging in the refrigerator. Expecting to find an ample supply of onions and root vegetables, I discovered only half a yellow onion, two carrots, a sweet potato well past its prime and a bag of rubbery celery. Too stubborn to abort the mission, I decided I'd have to abandon my customary practice of chopping the vegetables into large pieces and cut them up small. To compensate for what I saw as an inadequate portion of onion, I added some onion powder. While I was in the spice rack, I spied the garlic powder, then the celery salt. Why not? I dumped in a generous pinch of both.
That soup was the best I'd made. Cutting the vegetables into smaller pieces seemed not only to enhance the taste of the broth, but to turn the finished product into more of a soup than a stew. The extra seasoning seemed to mellow the flavor of chicken fat in the broth; despite my effort to skim every bit of fat from the top of the stock, it seemed impossible to eliminate the taste of it altogether.
Before I made soup again, I did a little reading. I read some theories about long slow cooking, about the importance of gently simmering, not boiling, the meat and bones in the process of rendering stock, about the use of seasoning in combination with certain meats and vegetables, about the use of wine as a way to tone down or turn up flavors in meat and particularly fat. And I read a bunch of recipes. But when Saturday afternoon came and I pulled out the pot and began to make soup, I closed the books and tried not to dwell on any specific idea I'd recently gleaned.
This time, however, I cooked at a lower temperature than I had before. When making the stock, I added garlic, salt and black pepper plus a cup of red wine to the water in which I gently simmered the chicken carcass. This time, I took extra care to chop the meat up fine, to about the same size as the vegetables. And I simmered the final concoction, more heavily seasoned than its predecessors, longer and slower than I ever had.
We didn't eat the soup that night, but left it covered but unheated on the stove overnight. Next morning, I added a cup of water and a half cup of wine and got the whole thing simmering again. About a half hour before serving it, I added a half box of elbow macaroni to the pot, which thickened the broth considerably.
The result brought rave reviews from my family and guests and increased my confidence to take my soupmaking to even dizzier heights.
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What I like about making soup is that it doesn't have the heavy demands that come with the kind of cooking that I don't like to do. Making a soup is slow cooking. No need for fancy techniques performed quickly, precisely, at the exact right moment. No chance of the disappointment you feel when, say, the tuna steak comes out a perfect medium rare but the green beans are cold and the polenta, perfect a few minutes ago, is now a rubbery glue. There's no pressure with soup.
But there can be complexity—enough complexity to keep things interesting, to keep a middling cook like me reaching for more.
Like a lot of people, I cook because I like to eat. Perhaps if I'd married a gourmet chef or I had enough money to hire one, I'd never cook again. But I married a cook like me, someone who can cook for herself and her family because she has to, who can make some tasty meals, who continues to learn and grow but will likely never aspire to, let alone attain, culinary greatness.
The soup on the stove this weekend was made with leftover steak and pork loin, stored frozen in bags along with other scraps for soups. I kept the broth thin, added back the meat, shredded, followed by black beans, broccoli, shallots, garlic, black pepper, red pepper, carrots, a dash of red wine (and a dash or two more) and a healthy drizzle of honey.
The pot simmered throughout the weekend, fogging the windows of the kitchen to frame the view of the backyard, covered in first snowfall of the year, filling the house with the friendly aroma of home cooking, but never interfering with something else we needed or wanted to do. My daughter played in the snow, went to a birthday party, did some shopping with my wife. I stacked firewood, cleaned the garage, did some writing, took a long hike to see if a nearby pond had any ice on it. Once in a while, when I came in from the cold, I stopped at the stove for a minute or two, ladled out a little taste, added a shake of this or a drop of that and went back to my chores.
That's my kind of cooking.
