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Alternative Lentil Soup (Dhal)

20 minutes

1 tablespoon oil

1 tablespoon curry powder

1 large onion, diced

1 carrot, diced

2 leeks, diced

2 celery sticks, diced

bacon bone scraps (from any butcher who cuts his own bacon)

125g (4 oz) dried lentils, rinsed, soaked in cold water for 1 hour and drained

1lt water (1¾pts) water, or use vegetable water

bouquet garni

15g (½oz) butter

1 tablespoon flour

140ml milk (¼pt)

salt and pepper

chopped assorted root vegetables and/or sliced boiling sausage

Heat oil in base of cooker, add curry powder and, as it sizzles, add onion, carrot and leeks. Fry gently to impregnate. Then add bacon scraps, lentils and water and proceed as for Lentil Soup recipe – this will give a mildly curried bite. You could also add:

 tomato purée to give the soup a redder colour and a sweeter taste.

 a smidgen of chilli sauce or Tabasco right at the end to give a hot undertaste.

 a drizzle of sesame oil just before serving to give a nutty flavour.

All these soups will be more or less familiar. You can make an instant meat soup by using the Clear Chicken Soup formula but substituting a meat or brown stock cube and scraps of cooked meat. You could make a thick tomato soup by using the Clear Brown Vegetable Soup formula but basing it on chicken (white stock) and adding tomatoes and a thickener like the blended raw potato or white sauce (see Lentil Soup). Leave out the tomato and put in more asparagus and you have cream of asparagus; substitute mushroom and you have the beginnings of cream of mushroom; and so on.

REAL SOUPS

You should be able to get a fair variety of soups simply by manipulating the ingredients, but “real” soups are even better.

They take a little more trouble but only a little more time. Thanks to the pressure cooker, very high-quality home soup making is entirely feasible, even for people who haven’t got all day for the preparations. And once you have started liking “real” soup, you won’t be able to bear the ready-made alternatives.

Soup consists of up to three elements:

 a base or stock, usually brown or white meat, fish or vegetable

 a thickener (if required), which can be flour or cornflour, potato, bean, grain, egg, cream

 solid ingredients, which can include almost everything under the sun

STOCKS

The French for stock is fond or base and every classic cookbook will tell you that the basis of a good soup is a good stock. Stocks are made by the intensive cooking of scraps of food – bones, tough meat, fish flesh, vegetables. The aim of the cooking process is to produce a strong-tasting fluid, low perhaps on vitamins, but high in concentrated minerals and certain proteins. A good stock, or even an indifferent one, gives a base undertaste to soups that water simply can’t provide and which cannot be added during a normal cooking process.

Most classic cookbooks start off by describing the foundation brown stock – made from meat scraps, bone and certain vegetables. I’ll follow precedent because there is a certain logic in doing so, but I also feel that some readers may think it a little unrealistic to open a book about a relatively instant cooking method by describing an hour-long process. Other readers may like to feel reassured that I frequently avoid making meat stocks for precisely that reason. I have three recommendations:

1 Use stock cubes. Buy good-quality ones free from mustiness and a floury taste. You need two main sorts: white (chicken) and brown (meat or beef). Try several brands before settling on one. I’ve experimented with the herb-, onion- and curry-flavoured stock cubes available and haven’t been impressed. You can also get stock “pots” that contain intensely reduced stock as a very thick liquid.

2 Rely on vegetable stock, which takes a far shorter time to prepare from scratch. Vegetable stocks usually don’t have the lasting qualities of meat-based ones, which is why they tend to get relegated in the classic cookbooks. There are vegetable stock cubes and pastes on the market.

3 Get to like fish soups. Fish stock is quick and easy to prepare as well. Again, good fish stock cubes or powders are rare.