For the love of food . . .

This is a piece I was working on for a competition. The brief was about how I learned to cook what food means to me. The deadline was 1 March. Ah well . . . .


It’s like sipping velvet. The pale creamy liquid drapes itself around my mouth, caresses my tongue and taste buds and flows teasingly towards my throat. The only thing that makes me willing to swallow is that there is still a generous bowlful of this heavenly substance in front of me. I am enthralled: truly, madly, deeply enthralled.

I dip the spoon again. The action of slipping the spoon beneath the surface of the soup releases the scents of cauliflower mingled with truffle oil, chicken stock and cream. I breathe in deeply as the aromas rise. Smell, taste, appreciate, swallow: as this minor miracle reaches my stomach, I swear I can feel it spreading warmth and wellbeing from the centre of my being to my very soul. “If soup could be the food of love . . .“ I think to myself . . . It’s my last rational thought until the bowl is finally, miserably, undeniably, utterly, empty.

Who’d have thought that a mere cauliflower could generate all that excitement?

We are always being told that some things improve with age and experience (nothing comes to mind at the moment) but there are equally times when the power of a first encounter creates an impact which can never be recaptured. I’ve eaten some good soups since that day but I’ve never experienced the same profound sense of rapture. It lives on in my memory along with that of my first kiss (lip-tinglingly special - don’t remember his name); first pedicure (I floated down the street afterwards) the first aromatherapy massage (so good I cried). I know that I can never recreate that moment - but it has not stopped me looking for more.

Soup is alchemy. How else do you explain the fact that when my children were younger, they would not eat vegetables but would eat vegetable soup?

I’ve cooked soups (and a great many other things) from recipe books for years. I have a shelf in the kitchen jammed with the combined wisdom of Delia, Nigel, Nigella and Madhur Jaffrey. But it was making soup for my children that gave me the confidence to put the recipes on one side for a moment and just improvise: that was when I really started learning to cook.

It all began by accident. I was standing in front of the open fridge, looking for something that the children might possibly consent to eat, when I noticed some left-over roasted veg, some gravy and a chicken carcass. On my way to the bin, I suddenly thought: “I could make soup with that,” And so I did. I made stock with the carcass; chopped up and fried off the vegetables; added the gravy and the stock; pureed it all; gave it to the children with some bread and they lapped it up. As the cliché so aptly has it: I nearly fell off my chair.

I quickly introduced a whole rainbow of other soups. In my house we eat Brown Soup, Yellow Soup, Green Soup, Orange Soup and Red Soup. The words parsnip, sweet potato, tomato, onion, carrot, red pepper, courgette and spinach are never spoken. The children dip in their bread and sup happily and have even been known to ask for seconds.

My favourite soup is the uninspiring-sounding Brown Soup. It gets made after the weekend and consists of whatever is left of the roasted vegetables that we ate with the Sunday roast. It’s best made with chicken stock freshly made from the roast chicken carcass after you’ve stripped off all the remaining meat to eat cold with chips and Action Man broccoli (I’ll explain that later) for Monday’s dinner en famille, (or to make into a stir fry if there’s only enough left for two).

These days, we don’t rely on there being left-over roasted vegetables, we plan for them. We have roast potatoes, roast parsnips, roast carrots, sweet potato, fennel, red and yellow pepper, garlic and onions. We also go a bit over the top on the gravy. There are occasions when there aren’t enough roasted vegetables left. If this happens you do have to supplement with the raw stuff, but this is to be avoided if possible because that involves more chopping and cooking and the whole point about this soup is to spend very little time on it.

Habit ensures that I always start cooking soups by frying off an onion but since the vegetables all have a glossy patina of oil from the roasting process, you probably don’t need to. All the roasted vegetables are roughly chopped up and added to the softened onion, mixed around a bit and then deluged with the chicken stock and any remaining gravy. With no raw vegetables involved and with stock that is added straight from the stock pot, you can be ready to puree in less than half an hour. Alternatively you could dissolve a stock cube in boiling water and get the same result.

Your soup will smell good enough up to this point but it’s what happens when the mixture goes into the blender that is the marvellous bit. Your nondescript-looking bowl filled with chunks of this and that is transformed into a thick, creamy liquid the colour of fudge. The analogy is particularly apt because the roasting process has caramelised the vegetables and when they are pureed what you get is an extraordinary nutty sweetness.

So, Brown Soup doesn’t look like it’s made of vegetables and to most unsuspecting children it doesn’t even taste like it’s made of vegetables. One other factor in its favour is that because I make it as a thick puree, it’s easy for even very young children to eat on their own. And that’s it just bread and a spoon and off we go.

Getting young children to eat vegetables – or to try new things – is a perpetual problem for parents. I have tried pleading, cajolery, extravagant praise - and threats. All of them have met with limited success. I even tried the “let’s cook something together and then they’re bound to want to eat it” approach – it failed dismally. I have been pretty successful at getting them to assist in cooking and baking but nine times out of ten they refuse to eat their efforts.

It was a variation on peer group pressure that opened the door to vegetable variety. For some reason I hit on the idea of using Action Man to encourage my oldest child to broaden his vegetable range. One evening, I told him that what was on his plate was Special Organic Action Man Broccoli. This Special Broccoli, I said, with as much sincerity as I could muster, was what Action Man ate to keep him strong and healthy and if he wanted to grow up like Action Man, he needed to eat it too. Broccoli is now the vegetable of choice in this house. If it can work with Action Man, I feel sure this strategy could work with Barbie or the Power Rangers or the Teletubbies. . . .

Over time, I have refined my strategy of coming in at an oblique angle. I served up haggis and neeps and tatties on Burns Night this year and told them it was “Scottish Food”. That sparked enough interest to ward off the usual “I don’t like that”, which is the standard response of Youngest Son to anything that gets put on the table (whether he does or not). Similar success was ensured by telling them that chicken liver risotto was “Italian food”.

We are not yet at the point at which I can cook anything and be confident that the children will eat it, but we are getting there.

One other key discovery that I have made is that the more expensive an item is, the more likely they are to enjoy it: hence they are keen devourers of Parma Ham, smoked salmon and good quality dark chocolates. My theory is that knowing how enjoyable good food can be will help them to avoid developing a taste for all the rubbish that will be pushed at them. It’s a theory that can put a bit of pressure on the shopping budget, but hey, it’s a great way of justifying it . . .