WINTER VEGETABLE SOUP

By Alice Waters

This “recipe” comes from Alice Waters’ first cookbook and memoir, Chez Panisse, published in 2007. It recalls a simple vegetable soup—Soupe des Légumes—she tasted in Paris during the winter of 1965 as a student. With no formal ingredients, just intuition and a respect for seasonal, local, organic produce, the dish became the spark that inspired Alice to devote her life to good food.

You start with real winter vegetables, mostly roots, like carrots and turnips, parsnips, parsley root sometimes. And maybe winter squash and some greens. Maybe a little potato to give it body. You cut the vegetables into equal-size cubes and sauté them with onions and garlic and herbs till they’re just starting to soften. Since it’s winter, I would probably use a couple of thyme branches and a bay leaf. A little lovage leaf might be nice in there.

Then you add your liquid, just enough to stew the vegetables till they’re nice and soft but haven’t lost their shape—an hour and a half, or two hours at the most. If you cook them too long, the taste is too strong.

You can use just water, for the pure taste of the vegetables, or a little light chicken stock, but really light, made from uncooked chicken parts and nothing else. It’s got to be more about vegetables than it is about the taste of the stock. Don’t forget to take out the thyme and the bay leaf.

You don’t want to use a blender or a food processor because that would make it too smooth. I use a food mill with the widest holes, so you still have a sense of the liquid in the soup. It’s not emulsified. You still have all those different colors—the oranges, the yellows, the whites, the greens.

It might just need a little oil or a little butter right at the end. You want to serve it as soon as it’s done. You don’t want to keep it overnight in the refrigerator.

There are other sorts of vegetable soups, very long-cooked, with many vegetables, a soup that likes to be reheated. Minestrone, for example. But this one keeps the bright, live taste of the vegetables. I’ll never forget that first time I tasted it.