An Exaltation of Soups: The Soul-Satisfying Story of Soup, As Told in More Than 100 Recipes

I found this book to be an extraordinary blend of humor, facts not known before, recipes out of the dark ages on up until now, and it is hard to put down once begun. Some of the information on food preparation in other countries is astonishing, and I salute the author on her dedication to assemble all this information into one book. I won't be lending the book out casually - it's too much a treasure for that!

This book is great - it provides interesting stories, history facts, and quips about soup. Great recipes, too!

AN EXALTATION OF SOUPS: The Soul-Satisfying Story of Soup, as Told in More Than 100 Recipes By: Patricia Solley "Little is nobler than presiding over a kettle of homemade soup." (Unknown) This is a cookbook you will likely read in most any room in addition to your kitchen -- hearty and stirring tales of 100 soups for more than 40 worldwide occasions ... Solley invites us to "look at a bowl of soup and see the evolution of foods created in remote locations over thousands and thousands of years, made into recipes passed from hand to hand, transported on the backs of Indian, Asian and Arab traders, Roman soldiers and European explorers all the way to your supermarket." Soup as an indicator is underscored when Solley invites us to regard the recipes, and at the same time think upon different cultures with personalized celebrations, their sacredness of family intimacy and rites of passage. An Exaltation of Soups is divided into four parts peppered with marginal Soup Notes containing riddles, quotes, wives' tales, advice, lyrics, sound wisdom and cautionary maxims. Not surprising, her six pages of Contents runs longer than her remarkably concise History of Soup. Part I Soup Basics containing soup history, proverbs, reflections and some very complete directions and for soup stocks, including the history of and directions for portable Pocket Soup, soup sometimes known as Veal Glue or Cake Soup. In Soup Reflections, she cites an anecdote from Winston Churchill's soup humor: "Well, dinner would have been splendid if the wine had been as cold as the soup, the beef as rare as the service, the brandy as old as the fish and the maid as willing as the Dutchess." Part II Soups of Passage celebrate worldwide cultural experiences from birth to marriage and finally, death. Part III Soups of Purpose from Losing Weight to Stimulating Appetite, Wooing a Lover to Treating Hangover. Part IV Soups of Piety and Ritual These take you through the entire calendar and to many civilizations from New Year's Day to year's end and Kwanzaa. Some recipes: On Birth from France: "Boiled Water" Garlic Soup. This is simply French bread, olive oil, water, 24 cloves of garlic, a couple of herbs and a garnished of Gruyere cheese. With a couple of exceptions, Soups To Celebrate and Recover From Giving Birth "are offered in small 'at home' portions, meant to be prepared quickly and served immediately," Solley tells us. On Marriage from China: Red Bean and Lotus Seed Soup - even simpler, this ceremonial soup calls for water, red beans, lotus seeds, tangerine skin and brown sugar. Simple is good. On Marriage again, from France: Blandness has its virtue. Take water, many onions, a few potatoes, tapioca, an egg yolk, heavy cream and butter. This also sounds after a day of extreme stress. Upon death, from France: Combine French bread, chicken meat, carrots, chicken stock and ground saffron. In her Soups of Purpose section

Pat does a great job keeping the reader's interest in this fine book. Solley's strong suit has always been her outstanding research abilities & it is clearly evident in her first published book about soups. Check her website www.soupsong.com for even more fun. Even if Pat wasn't my sister, I would still be hugely proud of her efforts!

`An Exaltation of Soups' is author Patricia Solley's published scrapbook of stories, proverbs, wit, wisdom, and recipes about soup. This is not my opinion. The author states this fact as clearly as you may please in her introduction. The author is far more of a researcher than she is a culinary professional, as she is chief of Research Communications and Public Relations for the FBI. Yes, that's the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington. In the spirit of being much more about the lore of soups than a culinary exploration as you will find in culinary specialists James Peterson and Barbara Kafka, the recipes are not organized by season or ingredient or thick versus thin or smooth versus chunky. They are organized by use. How do we human inventors of cooking over 10,000 years ago use this food preparation called soup? The first Part of four (4) is `Soup Basics'. It does not deal with soup cooking so much as with a speculative history of the origins of soup, a collection of soup proverbs and clichés, a small collection of stories about soup, and recipes for soup stocks. This includes seven basic stock recipes plus a technique for clarifying stock and a technique for concentrating stock. While this collection has several stocks you may not easily find elsewhere such as a Hungarian chicken stock and a Japanese fish stock, all the recipes are relatively simple. Simpler, for sure, than what you may find from the CIA (Culinary Institute of America, not the foreign colleague of the FBI) textbook or cooking experts such as Jeremiah Tower or Judy Rodgers. They are much simpler than expert soup specialists such as Seattle's Michael Congdon, the author of the new recipe collection, `S.O.U.P.S'. But then, this book is not so much about cooking soups as soup's place in the goings and comings of various human communities. The second Part is `Soups of Passage'. Here is where the book comes into its own, as we are given recipes for various important events in our lives, or at least in the lives of members of some very important cultures. The four `passages' represented here are birth, confirmation, marriage, and death. It is no surprise that the largest selection by far are those recipes developed to celebrate marriage, including the famous Italian wedding soup with meatballs. Oddly, I seem to recall that the name of this soup with meatballs has less to do with a human wedding as it does with the wedding of ingredients. The third Part is `Soups of Purpose'. Here, unlike the preceding and following chapters, the soup recipes are constructed to accomplish a specific culinary objective, so that there is a connection between ingredients and cooking techniques and the soup's use other than simply tradition. The most famous of this breed is the `Les Halle Onion Soup', which I had the pleasure of sampling at a Les Halle bistro in Paris at 5:00 AM, along with the traditional glass of red wine. The author recounts a tale from Harold Pinter about the playwright's