As I sit here in the middle of a blizzard warning yet to make landfall with full force, I’m reminded of one of my favourite tricks in soup making. If you’re not making soup and still buying the rubbish in a tin you’ve really missed the kitchen boat. Culinary neophytes can make soup on the first day of class. Hermits in the forest can make soup. Literally anyone can make soup successfully with whatever is laying about. Even my cats could make soup in a blizzard although watching them try to peel a carrot is an exercise in comedy.
My trick, learned not from an Italian grandmother but a rather spry young cheese merchant decades ago, is to add a few inches of the otherwise useless rind of hard cheeses like Parmesan into the simmering pot. Soup by its nature is a master class in slow cooking of an often disparate collection of ingredients so they sum up to greater than the parts. The inclusion of just a bit of rind makes the whole affair dance together like a Bollywood showcase. And I’m not just talking about the Italian “Wedding Soup” craze, whatever that is, but any soup you care to name. Include it when making your own stock if you’re attempting a recipe that’s too thick or too quick to really get the flavour out and use that as part of the final mix. Bacon, leek, and potato soup really loves this idea.
The veg soup you see above is simply my stock standard family version of potatoes, carrots, celery, onions, and tinned tomatoes with frozen peas tossed in at the end for good measure. Nothing at all fancy that can be whipped up without thinking using any proportions you deem proper – or any proportions your dwindling pantry offers. Where I tease out the flavour into something worthy is with two hefty spoons of soy and an equal measure of nutritional yeast (which adds a chicken-like taste), a generous hand of whatever herbs are around, a modest dose of fresh chiles or chile flakes, and the aforementioned cheese rind. It looks like nothing at first but an hour later on the lowest simmer you can manage the whole house smells delicious. That rind is as much about aroma as it is flavour. Those are my pull-apart rolls on the side if you’re looking for equally quick bread with the final tally for a generous bowl’s worth plus a roll coming in under fifty cents. There’s a reason they had soup kitchens during the depression.
Back when I had big hotel restaurant kitchens as customers I visited one of an evening only to find them tossing giant stacks of their spent Parmesan and Romano rinds in the bin. They got through entire forty-kilo wheels every few days during banquet season. On the promise that I could get some of the castoffs in my next visit, I mentioned the trick to the chef who just happened to have a vat of soup on the simmer that very moment. Two hours later I got a call to say that my cut of the booty was available for pickup and that his soup world had changed forever.
