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Small Soups as Starters Cutting the Calories
Soups have a cherished place in the world of appetizers. Every chef lists a few on their menus, and small soups are without question my favorite way to start a dinner party at home. Leading off with a small bowl of soup immediately calms any hunger pangs guests may be bringing to the table, and there’s nothing intimidating about serving it and eating it. Many of the soup recipes in this chapter are cream soups, based on making a béchamel sauce (see page 21). While there is some flour in these soups, most of them are thickened with the vegetables cooked in stock before the dairy product is added. These soups come from the repertoire of classic French food, and they were popularized in this country via the countless “Continental restaurants” that dominated the scene in the first half of the twentieth century. Cream was first used by the Italians in the ninth century, but its popularity is most often credited to the Austrians in general and the pastry chefs of Vienna in particular. Topping everything with whipped cream has been a practice in the Austrian cuisine for more than 300 years.
Many of these recipes are written for heavy cream, which has a hefty 50 calories per tablespoon. In contrast, whole milk comes in at 150 calories for a whole cup (9 calories per tablespoon), and half-and-half is 18 calories per tablespoon. While there’s nothing like the luxurious mouthfeel of a soup made with heavy cream, there’s also no reason to not make cream soups because of the fat content. You can cut down to half-and-half and not really tell the difference, or you can go to whole milk. If using milk instead of cream, increase the amount of flour in the béchamel sauce by half. If a recipe calls for two tablespoons, use three. If a recipe calls for heavy cream that’s not part of a roux, then mix a tablespoon of cornstarch with a little cold water and thicken the soup with the slurry. But please don’t use any reduced-fat milk products, like 2% or 1%. The resulting soups will taste thin and just plain watery.
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