Half the garden soup - if only
- May 7
- 4 min read
"improvising is what leads to discovery." Mark Diacono
Time for a first recipe on a dismal day. And I guess my first recipe today - Half the garden soup - Mark Diacono/The Accidental Smallholder, if not exactly dismal is hardly exciting. Although actually it could be because of those words about improvising.
The book is no. 4 of the River Cottage Handbooks - Veg Patch - and here is the River Cottage veg patch. Hardly a patch of course, and professional one too. And, of course, also so very British, which isn't to say that the British are not into more adventurous garden vegetables these days.
Mark Diacono is the writer of the book and one-time head gardener at River Cottage - maybe he still is, although he has his own farm now or as well back then. I assume that he also wrote the recipes, although because it's River Cottage, many seem to assume the recipes are Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's. I don't know.
Most of the book, of course, is all about vegetable gardening - at which I am a complete failure. How to set one up, what to grow together with a list of all the possible vegetables and everything about them. So if you really want to set up a vegetable garden then this is a very useful book - if your climate is similar to the British one.
So how to say something mildly interesting about this? For I will keep to my self-made rule of the first recipe in all of the books on my shelves, even if they are not that interesting. It's a challenge.
Interesting - so subjective a word. What's interesting to me won't be interesting to you necessarily and what I find interesting on one day isn't necessarily interesting on another. So is a basic soup such as this one, made from vegetables from the garden - well somebody's garden or even somebody's massive farm in Queensland or Western Australia interesting?. Half the garden soup is a good title for a recipe though, and in Mark Diacono's case it is indeed a selection from the garden he maintained, but not anywhere near half.
Names are important however to get you interested as Nagi Maehashi confesses in her introduction to this Country harvest root vegetable soup:
"I’m calling this a harvest root vegetable soup so it sounds like I casually threw in whatever we dug up from the garden during our latest harvest. But the truth is, there was no harvesting involved, and I definitely don’t live in the country. I’m smack bang in the middle of Sydney! I just wanted to give it a cute name – 'root vegetable soup' just doesn’t quite have the same ring to it!
And note, that she has blended her soup - as indeed you could for your kitchen garden soup. It's colour would depend on what you had in it and anyway these days you can tart it up with swirling through something or scattering stuff on top. And when I think about it even back in the day we used to scatter chopped parsley over things to make them look more attractive.
I cannot resist here inserting a picture of Richard Olney's Soupe tôt faite - which means Quickly made soup - because all this one is, is potatoes and leeks cooked together in water with some salt and pepper until soft. served with a slice of bread in your bowl and some olive oil sprinkled on top. I have made this - and it's delicious - because really it's a deconstructed Vichysoisse.
So it is therefore inevitable that a Half the garden soup is also going to be delicious because you have more vegetables with more taste than the delicate taste of potatoes and leeks.
Mark Diacono suggests onions, tomatoes, carrots, beetroot, zucchini, peas, runner beans, spinach and kale but of course this is a 'what you have' kind of thing and so he adds at the end:
"Pretty much any harvest you have available can be swapped for a similar weights of one of the same family."
And like Richard Olney the liquid is water because:
"You won't need to use any stock as the vegetables add so much flavour of their own"
You might say it's rather like Minestrone - but not really. That always seems to be a richer soup - perhaps because of tomatoes boosted with tomato paste, and generally with stock and/or wine as the liquid component, not to mention, maybe some pasta to thicken it and some Parmesan to add umami richness.
For most of us its real title might be Half the veg box in the fridge soup rather than Half the garden. If most people don't cook really then I'm pretty sure even fewer of them don't have a vegetable garden. Those are rare in spite of the best efforts of people like Stephanie Alexander, and various community gardens. There aren't even the allotments they have in England. The French, however - away from the cities anyway - are ardent vegetable gardeners. You see them everywhere - the gardens that is. We once saw one right at the top of a long climb up to a ruined castle.
So yes this might be a boring recipe. Surely we all know how to do this? And because the foodie world is so much into appearance these days we all know how to make things look better - even if it is just a scattering Parmesan or parsley, a dollop of cream or pesto, a sprinkling of nuts or seeds or a drizzle of oil. Oh the things a drizzle of oil can enhance.
And you know what - a soup such as this is delicious, even if you don't add spices, herbs miso or harissa to it. Just cook the root vegetables first and add the leaves last.
Challenge your grandchildren to raid the fridge and make soup. It's an infinite world of possibilities in there.
YEARS GONE BY
May 7
2023 - A rainy day dish
2022 - Nothing
2021 - Missing
2020 - Missing
2019 - Nothing
2018 - Nothing
Soup... what is there left to say that has not been said a thousand times. But did the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans sip their soup with a spoon or glug it down with a cup? 🤣