Yesterday evening I think I surpassed my personal best – four different soups within twenty-four hours. I have very good teeth, so this is a pity (in my forties and no fillings, Iranian genetics apparently). I’ll be in my care home, begging for soup, and being given other nasty crunchy things like Kiev and fish fingers, when I all want is my slops. Actually I like Scotch eggs as well, so the children have been primed to smuggle them in. I’ll be OK.
So yesterday evening was Tom Green’s excellent squash soup (from the allotment, last one for a year), with home-grown garlic, sausages and a dash of cream. For lunch, at the Royal Society of the Arts (thanks to two very lovely academics, with whom I was discussing, rather pertinently, a food project), I had a minestrone, which was a trifle too sharp on the tomato, but otherwise very nice indeed. Earlier that day I’d pre-cooked a veg soup (nothing special, I had to use up what was in the fridge), and then skimmed off a clear soup for my fussy beloved daughter before whizzing the rest up with the handheld, so obviously I had to have a quick taste. And then, the night before, I’d cooked down the end of a chicken with sweetcorn, melted down the quivering jelly and then made the most delicious soup, which we gobbled up with homemade bread.
I guess I wouldn’t be in such a soupy mood if it wasn’t for two things; a nasty cough and a rubbish spring. So soup is my compensation and my comfort blanket. I can eat it and all my self-pity magically disappears.
Other people, in these dark times, grow beards, it appears. I eat soup.
Katharine Quarmby 