This winter warmer will swallow up your leftover Christmas cheese,but should you start with shallots and consume chicken stock? And does it need double cream?So entrenched is broccoli and stilton in my canon of classic soups – well up there with the likes of tomato, minestrone and chicken broth – that I’m slightly taken aback not to find it in Lindsey Bareham’s comprehensive collection A Celebration of Soup, and indeed in any of the other books I have on the subject. The vegetable section yields similarly slender pickings,with not even a passing mention in Nigel Slater’s Tender, and nary a sniff in Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book, and either. Broccoli and cheddar soup is relatively common in the United States,but I wonder whether the stilton number was popularised by the modern Covent Garden Soup Company, which burst on to the market in the late 80s with soup that didn’t come in a tin, or certainly not in oxtail flavour. Its broccoli and stilton version made quite an impression on me as a child. Whoever’s responsible,it’s a stroke of creative genius – the wealthy, salty cheese bringing out the pleasingly bittersweet flavour of the broccoli and the perfect final destination for any odds and ends of stilton that might be lingering after Christmas. Vegetable soup is very January.
Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk