Imperative cooking: no to soup
THE man ,‘ ho tried to teach politics to lazy undergraduate Anderson was Profes- sor Peter Campbell. Patient and kind, he was also a scholar specialising in French politics. I remember just one thing. `The French question, the matter I find most awkward to decide', he said, 'is whether to have the soup or the pâté. Both so good. Which to (+nose?'
That was 95 years ago. Now an English version of the problem has arisen. The French problem can be solved as I found but in the early. Seventies in Aveyron. The answer is `both' but only for the men. Ladies hover and do necessary things, then join the men after the soup. After the soup there are hors d'oeuvres then pâté and saucisson, then potatoes, then the rest. Dogs also eat soup for breakfast. This we have discussed before.
The English problem is different. Since those early Sixties, the English have adopted pâté with enthusiasm and some- times with slices of fruit bandaged to it. There is no shortage. But it has become inseparably joined to something called 'and-a-crusty-loaf-and-a-bottle-of-wine- down-in-the-fresh-air'; it is also 'a- wonderful-spread' at parties, 'help your- self, there are three sorts of pâté — that's the one without garlic if you're with or after the ladies or got to see the boss tomorrow for a rise, and there's cold chicken, ham, salads over there, potato, coleslaw, nuts. . .
Good home-made pâté is rare at the dinner party table. The competition there is between soup and solids such as crudités, cooked vegetables, fish — all the various hors d'oeuvres. And in my narrow circle, it's soup which gets offered, more often than not cold soup. There is nothing wrong with cold soup. I believe leek, potato and cream is the Queen's favourite. But that, gazpacho and all manner of liquids em- ploying watercress have no right to van- quish the hors d'oeuvres.
In the last five years, outside two house- holds which have asked to remain anony- mous, among the dishes I have not been offered are: a well-made aspic with artichoke hearts, cold puréed aubergines with olive oil and capers, a grand aioli with salt-cod and potatoes and carrots and leeks and lots of aioli, courgette flowers stuffed with pork and herbs, stuffed tomatoes, a simple tomato salad of Roma tomatoes, basil, good heavy oil and lemon, Italian roast peppers, freshly cooked cockles, whelks, a cold ratatouille of aubergines, peppers and courgettes, pigs' ears in jelly, pigs' feet in jelly, liver, kidneys and all manner of cured meats in various Spanish sauces, cold pressed tongue with capers (almost anything with capers), eggs with a tapenade of soaked salted anchovies or sardines, olives, capers, marc olive oil and perhaps tuna, tuna itself (fresh), squid, octopus, cuttlefish all fried or stuffed or marinaded and raw or in tomato and wine or paprika, smoked cod's roe (the proper stuff), tiny red mullet, eels stewed in oil or garlic, or jellied, home made sausages with different herbs and spices, with pork or game or blood, tripe dishes, oysters, mus- sels, the big ones, no, not those imported frozen ones from New Zealand, just our own but the biggest, stuffed with pork and garlic, clams raw or steamed or d la plancha, spinach pastries, all those things the Nicois do with Swiss chard (but not too often please), properly smoked fish, pick- led lemons, peppers in wine vinegar, au- bergines dipped in wine vinegar and pick- led in olive oil, field mushrooms stuffed or with bacon, ceps, shaggy ink caps, puff- balls, rillettes, beignets of brains, snails with butter, in wine, in stock with garlic, fresh anchovies with mild onions, small meat kebabs, small fish kebabs, white fish with shellfish in bechamel, scallops, her- ring roes, quenelles, various types of pureed vegetables with oil but best peas or broad beans, fennel and lemon. Why not?
The fact is that every time someone serves you cold leek and potato soup, he or she is depriving you of these things. And you'll not get them for the main course (soup servers generally serve only one prepared course afterwards before pud- ding). That will be monopolised by the ten veg with the main ingredient chosen so as to offend no one.
All Spectator readers should give up soup for a year. Above all, no soup must be inflicted on guests (if you really can't do without, be like the French dogs and have a bowl for breakfast). Solid hors d'oeuvres only. And for those with a real taste for discipline, a different hors d'oeuvres each day for a year: there are enough. Neither you nor your guests will want to return to the tureen when it's over.
Digby Anderson
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