Soup Magic

by

Nicki Leone

Last week I had to take a rather ridiculous overnight trip to Las Vegas that involved about twenty hours of flying time and kicking my heels in airports, and about eight hours of actual meeting time. I left at about 3:30 am on one morning, and returned at about midnight the following day, all but whimpering with exhaustion and distress. When I woke up the next day, the first thing I did was make a pot of very strong coffee. Then when I had drunk all of it, I made another pot, and put a pot of hot and sour soup (ordered on purpose from the take out Chinese restaurant down the road for when I returned) on the stove.

Soup is comfort food to me. It always has been. More than a few of my favorite meals from childhood are soup dishes: the Campbell’s Alphabet Soup we loved as kids. A savory black bean soup mom used to serve with wedges of lemon. Creamy tomato soup that, with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is even now the most consoling and comforting lunch I can think of. The usual chicken noodle soup all children are force-fed when they are sick. (I preferred chicken and rice). And mom’s famous vegetable beef soup, which she made from scratch, took all day to cook, and which I have never yet managed to duplicate, even though mom gave me the recipe years ago.

Even after I moved away from home, soup was always a preferred staple of my diet, and with the exception of a single semester in college, I have never lived anywhere without a kitchen and a way to make great simmering vats of the stuff. I am what food writer John Thorne calls a “pot cook.” I love to throw things into a pot and let them simmer away, filling the whole house with the easy aroma of care and comfort. And as an adult, I’ve mastered my own repertoire of soups—a split pea soup that doesn’t need ham, a beef and mushroom soup that uses a whole bottle of beer in the broth and is served with crumbled bleu cheese. French onion soup that takes about six hours to make. Even this year’s Thanksgiving dinner menu was built around a curried sweet potato soup recipe I had discovered and could not let go of.

But one thing that continues to defy me is hot and sour soup. I learned to love this when I lived in Boston and frequented tiny hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese diners, dingy Thai restaurants and garishly lit Chinese take-out places. Indeed, hot and sour soup is a kind of benchmark recipe for me, by which any Asian restaurant may stand or fall (more usually fall). It got me through the cold wet Boston winters, through exams and breakups and long work days. I even found a place that made a vegetarian version during my hippy dippy crunchy granola days when I practically lived on stir-fried tofu. But I never learned to make it myself, since it doesn’t come canned or dried, and I never found a reliable recipe or developed any real confidence when shopping in the Asian markets for the ingredients. I used to wander up and down the aisles of the Chinatown groceries with a list of carefully drawn Chinese characters to help me find what I was looking for, only to discover that I’d copied some character slightly wrong, and could not really be sure that the item I was holding was actually the right thing. Oh sure, I could pick soy sauce out of a line up. But nam pla? Oyster sauce? Dried tiger lily buds and bonito flakes? These were unfamiliar entities and I could tell nothing about the several different brands that stood on the dusty shelves. Usually I just chickened out and stuck with the tofu.

Those days of wandering bewildered through the Chinatown markets came back to me in a fragrant rush when I was paging through Teresa M. Chen’s A Tradition of Soup: Flavors from China’s Pearl River Delta. Cookbooks like this one both intrigue and frustrate me. Intrigue, because the book explores a cultural heritage that is ancient and interesting—a look at a facet of Chinese cooking that is as far removed from my Panda Chinese take out joint down the road as Papa John’s Pizza is from my Calabrian grandmother’s notion of real Italian cuisine. But frustrating, because the Pearl River Delta, let us be honest, is far, far from my home on the Carolina coast and the more care the author takes to be authentic in her recipes, the more exotic and unusual they get, and the more unlikely it is I will ever be able to actually make any of them. And Teresa M. Chen takes great care to be rigorously authentic.

Still, the book does have one thing that makes it worth the trouble—a good recipe for hot and sour soup.

A Tradition of Soup focuses on the place of soup in Cantonese cuisine, specifically around the rich and fertile Pearl River Delta in China, and what might be called its sister culture in Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in California, where so many Chinese immigrants ended up after fleeing war, repression or famine in their own country. Chen works with the Jene Wah, Inc. community center in Stockton—an organization dedicated to helping Chinese senior citizens to overcome the cultural and language barriers that often isolate them even in our modern, seemingly endlessly intrusive society. The book began as an inquiry into the role of soups in traditional Chinese healing traditions, and turned into a kind of elaborate oral history of twelve women from the center whose inherited traditional soups form the foundation of the recipes and the story.

And it is a story. Divided into four parts, it is only at the last, fourth part that the author gets around to giving out actual recipes. Most of the book is a discussion of Chinese healing traditions, the role of soup—and indeed, of cooking—in creating a well balanced diet and healthy life, and look at the various techniques, traditions and ingredients used when making soup, either for culinary or medicinal purposes. Here in America our mothers fed us chicken noodle soup when we caught a cold. But there are soups for dry skin, for controlling cholesterol, for improving digestion, for treating acne.  “In our Western society,” says the author, “where food is in abundance, people do not eat well. My experience is that women with hot flashes would rather take pills three times a day than take the time to make themselves a pot of delicious Danggui and Chicken Soup. Their symptoms do go away with the pill, but do they know what they are missing? To me, the former is medication and while the latter is nurturing.” And then, more pointedly she asks “Do we really prefer to eat like astronauts in space?”

I don’t. Besides, putting things in a pot to simmer for several hours is such a simple and rewarding way to eat. “Soup magic is easily accessible,” says one of the ladies of Jene Wah. I found this to be true of A Tradition of Soups, despite the fact that some of the traditional ingredients covered included things like chicken feet, sea cucumber, seahorses, and swallows’ nests. I had always thought that “swallows’ nests” was a rather ornate term for some kind of variety of rice pasta or noodle. But no, it is a quite literal phrase referring to the nests of a specific species of swallow. I won’t go further into it, except to say that it is very rare (really, you have to wonder who decided it was edible it in the first place), and therefore a delicacy that, despite having medicinal properties, I feel certain we can all live without. (Ditto on the seahorses.)

Most of the recipes, however, are not so unusual. In fact, skipping over the section that focuses on meat and animal protein, most of the recipes in the book are actually quite easy to make if you have access to an Asian market or grocer, and perhaps a slightly adventurous spirit. The vegetarian soups, especially, are both simple to prepare and delicious, and the soups that use seafood can border on the decadent. The recipes usually call for slow cooking times, which means a willingness to let things simmer away on the back burner of the stove for several hours, but there are a few of what Chen calls “quick and easy” soups that only require minimal preparation. I found, to my chagrin, that she puts hot and sour soup in this category, which can only mean that no matter how well I thought I could cook, to a Chinese grandmother I would be a complete novice.

Or maybe “apprentice.” Because the take out hot and sour soup I had last week has been replaced by my first attempt at a home-made version this week, with gratifying results. Panda Chinese take out may never hear from me again.

Books mentioned in this column:
A Tradition of Soup: Flavors from China’s Pearl River Delta by Teresa M. Chen (North Atlantic Books, 2009)


Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.