The joys & sorrows cooking: Memorable dishes & duds.

As most things, cooking is a mix of good, bad and occasionally wonderful experiences. Over the past few months I have been making soups, they are welcome when the weather is cold and they are very adaptable when the time of the dinner hour is not easy to predict.

There are more tricks and tweaks to making soups than I know and as often as not my efforts were disappointing. Some reasons for this are not understanding all the ingredients, not having the right stock or knowing how to finish or served the soup properly.

Two recent disappointments involved red lentils and pearl barley. In the first case I had no idea that red lentils are the most elastic and greedy legume. You soak them for a time before cooking and yet they seem to grow and absorb all the moisture in the pot. A small amount of lentils has an endless and insatiable thirst. Mo matter how much stock, water or wine I added to thin the pot of red lentil soup, the little beggars sucked it up. It was a tasty but very thick gruel of lentils and vegetables. Finally in desperation I called a friend from India where red lentils are much in use. He said dump a pint of whole milk yogurt into the pot. I did and end up with a very rich thick but at least more or less liquid result.

Another dud was attempt to make a very old fashion Scotch Broth. This soup, after the legendary Haggis, is Scotland's number two national dish. The name, Scotch Broth is ironic since it is a very thick and hearty soup, indeed almost a stew. Broth is very definitely something it doesn’t resemble at all. That is the Caledonian joke in the name. Now in this dish the ingredient that is critical is pearl barley. I remember that my grandmother often used it in her soups and so did a couple of the simple Italian American restaurants where we went on Sunday afternoon for two hour long dinners.
At the bottom of the soup bowl was a layer of soft chew round grains of pearl barley and they made the otherwise ordinary minestrone or vegetable soups richer and more interesting.

Now the trouble with this beloved ingredient is estimating the right amount of pearl barley to put in the soup. On my first attempt I followed the recipe and it clearly was not enough. It was so not enough that I poured in another batch of what the recipe called for. Well half an hour later the scotch broth became a gruel that would hardly allow the ladle to move it around. Oooooops.

This week I am going to try to make Hungarian “Hangover” soup which is, if I get it right, a very zippy bowl of paprika rich cabbage, sauerkraut, vegetables, sausages and chicken broth. This tangy soup is one of my favorites at a local Magyar bakery restaurant. I’ll let you know how it goes.

- xxx -