Review: Recipes for Soups

Publisher: Hamlyn

With the chilly weather now petering out, however fitfully, warm soups are still a welcome addition to the family menu.

This simple book provides dozens recipes for a variety of soups, with a few spins on old classics and some modern concoctions, something for every diet.

Contents

When I first got this book for review I found myself bookmarking several pages and our family was eager to try some of simpler soups. The recipes range from simple vegetarian starters, such as coriander and lentil soup or brothy chickpeas with tomato and chilli, to fancy main courses such as venison red-wine-and-lentil soup or lamb-and-barley hotchpotch.

It also includes sections on stocks and breads, which includes recipes for flatbreads, scones, muffins and cheese twists.

Some of the recipes are effortlessly simple, such as the many variations of squash soup, while others have a bit more flair, such as the mushroom Madeira soup or the Thai-tamarind broth.

There are also traditional recipes with modern twists, such as matcha-mushroom noodle or bloody-mary soup, which is exactly what it sounds like; tomato soup with a splash of vodka.

Let’s try it out

Our family played it safe to start and tried some of the squash-soup variations. The Indian spiced-squash soup adds ginger, curry and coriander to the butternut base and bulks the protein content with red lentils. We made it for a bring-and-share event and several of the guests asked me for the recipe afterwards.

A less spicy variation of the butternut and red-lentils combo added rosemary for a more savoury flavour. Both variations were a hit.

Design

The book has an uncomplicated design reminiscent of the old-school recipe books that my senior aunts treated like family Bibles. Slim, simple and without fluff, the book is presented compactly, with more than 60 recipes in less than a 150 pages.

Part of a series, which also includes Recipes for Pickling and Preserving, Recipes for Savoury Bakes and Recipes for Summer, this book is a must-have for the family shelf.

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