Soup for Every Body : Low-Carb, High-Protein, Vegetarian, and More

Rating:
Summary: Good Soups. Only Fair Presentation for Healthy Use
Review: `Soup for Every Body' by Joanna Pruess, with culinary coauthority from Lauren Braun RD, LD is a very nice little soup book that specializes in recipes that cater to five different dietary doctrines. These are `Low Carb', `High Protein', `Smart Fat', `Low Calorie', and `Vegetarian or Vegan'. While I have not read or reviewed any of Ms. Pruess' other works, her biography places her among the middle range of talented and respected cookbook authors such as Jean Anderson, Mark Bittman, and Jack Bishop.

My very first reaction to this book is that it is bound to fail, as it tries to imitate the Democratic Party in trying to appeal to five different, not necessarily compatible special interest groups. The two most antagonistic interests I can imagine are Vegan versus low carb. I do not know low carb doctrines, but I do know that meat, eggs, and heavy cream are low carb darlings while these are antithetical to vegan diets. I also note that the very dairy heavy cream and the very meaty chicken stock are both listed as ingredients of a soup cited as being suitable for `Vegetarian or Vegan'. I know my favorite vegan niece would turn up her nose at this recipe.

I am convinced that the four best ways to combine healthy interests with soup cooking are:

1. Describe how to turn typical recipes into healthy recipes by things like replacing butter and animal fat with olive oil, replacing white bread with whole grains, and replacing meat stocks with vegetable stocks.
2. Provide simply all around healthy recipes, as you may find in a book by Kathleen Dahlmans.
3. Provide recipes for classic and modern vegetarian soups, with an emphasis on variety.
4. Provide recipes for low carb soups.

I am not an expert on dieting, but I suspect that most diet plans succeed as much or more from their reinforcing a ritual which sanctifies the effort and encourages compliance, possible by making the dishes just a tad less pleasant than unhealthy alternatives. I think that nutrition and eating for all around good health is the best approach to not gaining weight and let exercise take care of loosing excess weight.

Now that that lecture is out of the way, I will say that this is a decent little soup book if you simply ignore all the nutritional baggage. I think the statistics on calories, calories from fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, carbohydrates, dietary fiber, sugars, proteins, vitamins, and minerals are so approximate as to be useless. Most experienced amateur cooks probably cook more like Rachael Ray or Jamie Oliver than they do like Ina Garten, who, like a true former professional caterer, has to create reproducible dishes, measures everything down to the teaspoon. Thus, the only way these measurements can make any sense whatsoever, you have to follow the measurements to a tee. And that doesn't account for variations in natural products. I am willing to bet that there is close to a 50% variation in some components in a pound of bay scallops depending on the location and season in which they were harvested, not to mention differences between wild and cultivated fish.

The book is divided into five (5) chapters on soups plus a chapter on garnishes and a chapter on stocks. The most unusual chapter is the ten (10) pages and five recipes devoted to fruit soups, a subject not commonly covered in most other `little soup books', although James Peterson's big soup book, `Splendid Soups' devotes almost twenty-five pages with seventeen recipes to the subject. The stock recipes are well within the tolerances of an amateur home cook, although the need to collect ten pounds of uncooked chicken carcasses, wings, backs and ribs may require just a bit more obsession with soup making than most people have. The only other argument with these recipes is that it keeps the veggies in the pot for the full three hours of simmering. Most authorities I respect put the veggies in for just the last hour. The chapter does get points for including both standard and rich brown chicken stocks and a rich duck stock.

The index confirms my growing opinion that the average cook who has at least one other good book on soups does not need this book. There is a Recipe Index organized by the five dietary concerns listed above, plus a general alphabetical index. A soup such as the Mediterranean Fish Soup with Quick Aioli appears in two different places in the Recipe Index, but does not appear in the alphabetical index.

This book does have good, well written recipes. And, if you are a low carb, high protein or low calorie fan, this book will give you very good soups. However, while my first sin of a poor book is to not stay on message, my second is to have a weak or confused message. This book is a waste of time and money for vegans and not the best soup book for vegetarians. It is probably better than soup recipes you will get in Atkins or South Beach recipe books. And, that is probably the very best thing that can be said about this book.

Buy this book if you are on a low carb regimen. If not, seek a good general book on soups such as the new CIA Book of Soups.