Soup & Dread
I’m doing Soup & Bread next week. Soup & Bread is a monthly winter-to-spring thing at legendary (and sometimes deeply flawed) cultural institution the Hideout where a bunch of famous chefs & home cooks make soup for anybody who wants to show up. Bread is always provided by some amazing bakery around town. It’s nominally free, but donations are collected for charity.
I want to reiterate that I am making soup for this next week.
I am reasonably terrified about this! I know I am a good home cook, but I’m also not the kind of person who cooks for hundreds of strangers at once. You know, like a chef. The kind of person who, on top of their Michelin stars, Wikipedia pages, and small empires, is frequently invited to Soup & Bread. Chicago is a food-mad city, and the standards are high. So I did what any normal, rational person would do, and spent four months freaking out about it. “I don’t know what to make,” I would say to anything with a pulse, several times a day, because I’m not insufferable. I did figure out what to make a week beforehand, and I think it will be good, but gosh, why did it take until now for that one to drop into my consciousness? I want to feel like I have some agency over this, that this is a higher priority, that I have some sort of special thing I will do.
I have no signature soup. I have bison chili, which we’ve talked about, and that takes me too long to make and is also not soup. I make Sichuan food more than anything else, and in that culture soups are an end-of-meal palate cleanser most of the time. Italy’s second place for me, and they’re not really a soup culture, either.
My soups are usually boring in the best ways. I make them in winter, when nothing is in season, and I can cover up low-quality produce with a lot of seasonings & fat. I make good stock. I sauté some onions & garlic in butter, throw some carrots & celery in, dump a bunch of stock in, and simmer for 15 minutes, then serve with some noodles or rice. Maybe, if I’m feeling sassy, I will sous vide some boneless meat and toss that in at the end. You’ve had some form of this before. It’s familiar, a warm hug. But I can’t just walk into Soup & Bread with that. Can you imagine? Soup & Bread isn’t competitive in the slightest, but my god, you don’t half-ass it. Making a basic, simple chicken soup at Soup & Bread is like the equivalent of reading the dictionary at your TED talk. You had better have written the dictionary if you’re going to do that.
I have not written the dictionary. My soup does not blow minds in the same way as my other cooking. But it is there, and it’s cold out, and so therefore soup.
I fully recognize that the aforetyped is a whole-ass exercise in impostor syndrome, in over-the-top Midwest humility, in classic actual-good-chef “THIS IS NOT MY BEST” energy. But I also know what I’m good at. What I do is simple stuff with few, well-sourced ingredients. And when I’m out of my league, as I clearly am here, then I am liable to think that something I do is not going to work as well as I think it could.
Still, food tastes better when someone makes it for you, and I will have an unfathomably charitable audience. I will be held by this and do the best I can. If you live in Chicago, come through and say hello.