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Preface
“Soup puts the heart at ease, calms down the violence of hunger, eliminates the tension of the day, and awakens and refines the appetite,” is the way Auguste Escoffier, the preeminent French chef of the early twentieth century, saw the role of soup at meals. Later in the century, legendary food writer M.F.K. Fisher asserted that “it is impossible to think of any good meal, no matter how plain or elegant, without soup or bread in it.” Perhaps this is why soups play such an important role on restaurant menus as well as in home kitchens. Chefs create “signature soups” as a reflection of their philosophy of cuisine. And then there are those wonderful surprises— the “soup of the day”—added to the menu to reflect seasonal ingredients and the climate at that precise time of year. For most months of the year, the soup put before you is hot, and the fragrance of the long-simmered ingredients waft upward in the steam to your nose. But then there are times when soups are served chilled, and these comfort you by naturally reducing your temperature on the hottest of summer days. Soups are the epitome of “comfort food,” a term that only entered the dictionary in the mid-1970s but has been around since cooking began. Neuroscientists define comfort as the opposite of stress, and humans are constantly
finding ways to relieve themselves of stress. While pharmaceuticals can play a role, even faster and easier is finding this restorative state through food. Comfort foods bring us a sense a security, a reward, and a feeling of connectedness to a larger community. This is why we crave different comfort foods when we’re in different moods. If you’re feeling isolated and lonely, you might want a comfort food linked to a sense of community in your brain; at other times, when facing daunting physical or metal tasks, the need is for food that signifies a reward. Soup can be any and all of these. It harkens back to our earliest memories, before food had to be chewed or we had teeth with which to chew it. Our muscles prefer foods that don’t make them work very hard, and a bowl of soup certainly fits that category, even if topped by crunchy croutons. As poet Maya Angelou writes, “Whenever something went wrong when I was young—If I had a pimple or if my hair broke—my mom would say, ‘Sister mine, I’m going to make you some soup.’ And I really thought the soup would make my pimple go away or my hair stronger.” Foods create both chemical and emotional responses. Sugar and starch produce serotonin, a neurotransmitter that increases one’s sense of happiness. Antidepressants like Prozac replicate 7
