A Beautiful Bowl of Soup: The Best Vegetarian Recipes

Rating:
Summary: A Delightful Book of Soup. Highly Recommended
Review: It is much easier to identify very good and very bad cookbooks than it is to identify the merely good or average cookbooks. I saw the beauty of this book with the first recipe I prepared from it. I have read two other books on soup by very famous cookbook authors Barbara Kafka and James Peterson and I would recommend this little book over both of their works. Both of these other works are good, worthy of five stars, but this volume by Paulette Mitchell is better for the price.

The fact that it is limited to only vegetarian and vegan recipes detracts not one wit from its value to the general cook. If this means anything at all, it means that the recipes will be less expensive and faster to prepare than recipes including meat. It especially means that you can make an appropriate homemade vegetable stock for these recipes very cheaply and easily, with no chicken sanitary problems to deal with.

The main body of the book with the chapters of soup recipes covers:

Creamy Soups featuring curried carrot, potatoes, squash, chestnuts, bell peppers, fresh peas, and peanuts
Chunky Soups featuring black beans, red lentils, chickpeas, asparagus, miso, minestrones and ribollita.
Chilled Soups featuring Vichyssoise, borscht, lettuce soup, avocado soup, and gazpacho
Dessert Soups featuring berry-wine, strawberry-rhubarb, gingered pear, and brandied pumpkin.

The chapter on chunky soups comprises about half the recipes. It should be clear from this list that most of the major soupy players are present. The only major type of soup one may miss is seafood chowders. For that, you can go to Jasper White's excellent book, '50 Chowders'.

Many recipes are vegetarian in that they include some dairy product; however, the author gives many tips on making the daried soups suitable to a vegan sensibility. The primary technique is to substitute soymilk for cow's milk and toasted breadcrumbs for grated cheese.

Before the main chapters of recipes, there is a short chapter on preparing vegetable stock. The book ends with an excellent chapter of recipes for 'garnishes and accompaniments' which gives recipes for pestos, croutons, and various toasted nibbles. Many recipes also include a garnish which may easily be treated as a recipe in itself and a garnish from one soup can be grafted onto the serving of some other soup.

Aside from the excellent selection of recipes for soups and supporting cast, the recipes are written in a very appealing format. Rather than undistinguished text or simple numbered steps, the steps are broken down into major activities, with numerous checkpoints to indicate where in the preparation it would be best to freeze or how to do parts of the preparation in advance. Soup and garnish steps and ingredient lists are always separate to easily mix and match soup with garnish.

The book is loaded with tips relevant to the particular recipe, but which are also relevant to general cooking techniques. To this end, the author has provided a separate list of alphabetized names of tips, so that if you wish to use crème fraiche in a recipe but you have forgotten the recipe, simply look it up in the tips list. Surely, the index would do as well, except that it would not be as easy to browse the tip titles and let serendipity take its course.

To top it all off, this is a very attractively composed book. The pictures are not abundant. Only about one in ten recipes has an accompanying photograph, but all pics are done in a way which compliments the overall design of the book. The plain black typesetting is possibly not as elegant as the kind of treatment it may have gotten from Knopf, but it is a very nicely designed book. The literary quotes headlined by a famous quote on soup by Lewis Carroll sprinkled here and there simply add to the pleasant experience.

One advantage to meatless recipes is that they will take less time to prepare; however, I do wish to soft pedal the author's suggestion that the recipes are fast and easy. If you make both soup and garnish, you may be dealing with more than one separate steam, saute, or blanche step. Cream soups will require breaking out the food processor, blender, or stick blender. Chunky soups will require a fair amount of knife work. But, don't hold this against this or any other book. Just don't buy it with the notion that you are buying a fast recipe book.

Very highly recommended especially for the price. Not fast, but easy for novices.