What chicken soup is to us, pea soup is to the Dutch -- an everlasting standby and cure-all.
When I have no vegetables on hand, I make this soup, which requires only onions and leftover bread. Grated Gruyère, one of my mother’s favorite additions to the soup, is a great flavor enhancer.
This chilled summer soup is a veritable garden in a bowl, with fresh mint, cilantro, peppers, and spring onions gathered from the potager just seconds before the soup appears at the table. A cup of this soup is an ideal accompaniment to any summer salad.
When scrambled eggs are beaten into hot broth, the eggs shred into "rags." The name derives from Straciatella, meaning rags in Italian. Adding spinach gives the soup an appealingly robust flavor.
You can vary the amount of water in this recipe in accordance with whether you want a proper soup or a more stewlike consistency.
This is an everyday Catalan fish soup that is more like a stew. It has several variants, but I love the way my friend Pepa Aymami makes it. Like so many Catalan dishes, it starts with a sofregit (sofrito in Castilian Spanish) of garlic and tomato, and a picada of ground almonds, garlic, and parsley is stirred in at the end. Use hake, cod, halibut, or other firm white fish.
The soup is good fresh from the pot, but even better for a day or 3 or 4 in the fridge. Refrigerates up to 6 days and freezes for 4 months.
If I had to choose one dish alone to represent my childhood, it would be this.
The Three Opportunities: You can dictate the character of your soup by how you decide to start cooking it.
Serve the borscht with dollops of the dill cream, garnished with more of the dill.