Rating: 
Summary: Practical soup from a practical monk
Review: Twelve Months of Monastery Soups is an excellent, seasonally based cookbook for practical soup making. However, you must take its estimation of servings as dubious - his "two servings" is eight servings as a meal in my house. Three things separate this volume from other soup cookbooks: (1) the soups are arranged by month that the ingrediants would be readily available in your garden or green grocer's. (2) the recipes are international but are the cooking "of the people" not of exotic chefs (3) delightful line drawings, quotations, odds bits of trivia etc. are sprinkled throughout the pages.To give you a flavor of the variety of recipes presented: for March we find a German Saint Lioba Beer and Mushroom Soup, a Spicy (East) Indian Soup, a Basic Onion Soup, a Tuscan Green Vegetable Minestrone, an Everyday Potato Soup, a Garlic Soup, a Lima Bean Soup, a Beguine Cream Soup, a Saint Patrick Irish Cheddar Soup ... All the recipes are easily made; they have clear instructions and ingrediate lists.
Rating:
Summary: Well concieved seasonal treatment. Great source.
Review: `Twelve Months of Monastery Soups' by Brother Victor-Antoine d'Avila-Latourrette set the model for this author's later book on twelve months of salads which I have already reviewed and which has become my constant `go to' book whenever I want to make a salad.
This book on soups is in a much more crowded field, as soups appear to be one of the most popular topics for single dish or single method cooking, probably just slightly behind grilling and baking cookies. It is certainly a more crowded field than books on salads. But, this book has two really important facts going for it in the face of this crowd of books.
First, soups are a dish where seasonality is not only important for which ingredients are available. Seasonality is important to the recipe as well. Heavy hearty soups are great in January while clear soups and cold soups are just the thing for July. Even when a recipe such as borsht is better suited to cold weather, the recipe in this book is lightened up and served cold to suit the summer, when many of it's ingredients come into season.
Second, Brother d'Avila-Latourrette really makes these soups on a regular basis and is dedicated to his subject in a way that journeyman cookbook writers are not. The good brother's book may not be quite a match for books from heavyweights such as James Peterson, author of `Splendid Soups' and Barbara Kafka's `Soups, A Way of Life', as these people are professionals of the highest water whose professionalism provides the quality which otherwise comes from passion and familiarity. Their professionalism will also provide the kind of recipes and background on good stock making which the good brother does not cover in depth. His recipe for chicken broth is simple, but not as clear as it could be, since it gives instructions based on burner settings, not endpoints described in terms of what is happening in the stockpot.
I have made several soups from this book and I find the recipes every bit as good and every bit as simple as Brother Victor-Antoine's recipes for salads. And, doing a simple soup recipe is a lot harder than doing a simple salad recipe. Unlike recipes by Peterson and Kafka, not all of these recipes fall into the `gourmet' camp. Some actually use bouillon cubes. And yet, when I did such a recipe, I was totally pleased with the success with which the recipe brought out the taste of mushrooms, the headline ingredient. I was especially pleased with this as mushrooms are one of my favorite foods and the main attraction of mushrooms is to take on the taste of other ingredients with their native taste blending into the background.
All of Brother Victor-Antoine d'Avila-Latourrette's books are decorated with Medieval and Renaissance woodcuts plus quotes from both religious and folk sources. Accouterments of this sort are a two-edged sword. I stumbled across a series of cookbooks done in rural Americana with exceedingly cute colored pencil or watercolor drawings and homey sayings which simply detracted from the book as a collection of recipes, since the relevance and the quality of the sayings was weak at best. The decorations and commentary in this book have exactly the opposite effect. They enhance the experience of reading the book and supply useful grace notes to the recipes.
The mix of recipes is a very nice combination of the familiar and the unusual. With borsht, minestrone, and bouillabaisse, we get Brussels sprout soup, Shaker style soup, cold salmon soup, and a hermit's soup. Added to the seasonality of recipe and ingredient, there is a seasonality of tradition, as many of the recipes are specific to a particular holiday, although many saint's days may be familiar only to card carrying Catholics.
I heartily recommend this over many more detailed but less inspired books on soup.And, unlike another reviewer, I assure you the recipes I tried were anything but bland.
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