More Souper Soups (New Covent Garden Book of Soup for All Seasons: Our Favourite Seasonal Recipes)

Member Name: Charris2002

Product:	New Covent Garden Book of Soup for All Seasons: Our Favourite Seasonal Recipes
Date:	10/11/08 (189 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Simplicity, Unusual, Healthy

Disadvantages: None that come to mind

The New Covent Garden Food Co have produced hundreds of varieties of soup since its inception in 1988 using fresh, natural ingredients. They've learnt what works, what doesn't and this book - Soup for all Seasons - follows the soup-cooks year and allows you to create sumptous soups at any time of year.

It wasn't until recently that I became a soup convert. My epiphany was at a dinner party when I was served a homemade Russian Vegetable soup. At first glance, it was rather disconcerting, a bowl of thick, seemingly gloopy, green (very green!) liquid, with a rather artistic swirl of cream being the only visually attractive contribution. However, once I actually tasted the soup, I was well on my way to being converted..the flavours were intense, complex, balanced and, taken together, formed an absolutely moreish soup....Unfortunately, the recipe for this soup doesn't appear in this particular New Covent Garden Company book...Sorry. However, it does appear in the Book of Soups - New, Old and Odd recipes. Please also see my review of this book.

However, this brightly coloured hardback book, seasonal vegetables on a tasteful orange background, provides a wide variety of soup recipes, some simple, some more complex, but (of those that I've tried) none disappoint in terms of flavour or in appearance.

Other than your recipes, which we'll come to in a moment, the book has an extremely useful list of larder ingredients the soup maker will need - oils, vinegars, fruits, sugars, herbs and spices, beans and pulses, sauces, mustards, tomatoes and alcohol. Whilst not totally exhaustive, I'm hard pushed to think of any basic ingredients missing for this list...

The following section has recipes for various stocks - beef, chicken, vegetable, lamb and fish. Like all of the recipes in this book, you are presented with a list of ingredients (both imperial and metric measurements) followed by a step-by-step guide to preparation.

All of the recipes themselves are kept as simple as possible - a list of bullet points that will guide you through preparation, cooking, garnishing and serving your soup. Truly, any budding cook can use this book and produce professional looking and tasting soups.

Autumnal soup recipes include Tomato, Fennel and Feta, Spicy Chicken, Pea and Apricot, Roast Pumpkin and Bramley Apple as well as old favourites such as Cock-A-Leekie and Cullen Skink.

Moving onto Winter, we have such exotic soups as Duck and Pomegranate, Christmas Dinner soup and Champagne and Camembert. Again, more traditional soups such as Chicken Broth and Simply Swede also make a welcome appearance.

Spring sees the arrival ingredients such as asparagus, crab, fresh watercress and crisp spring greens amongst others. Highlights for Spring include Butternut Squash, Wild Salmon Chowder, Beetroot and Rhubarb, White Onion and a superb, sweet Chocolate and Rhubarb Swirl (a bit fiddly but highly recommended.

Summer eventually arrives and perhaps my favourite soup (to date anyway!) Smoked Mackerel and Horseradish. The horseradish cuts through the oiliness of the mackerel and works like a dream - stunning! Simple soups such as Watercress and New Potato, Broad Bean and Garlic prove a tasty alternative to perhaps Crab and Artichoke or Carrot, Sweetcorn and Elderflower.

It also sees recipes such as Summer Fruits with Mango Custard and Strawberries, Cream and Champagne - not strictly soups but deliciously decadent!

Unlike other books in the series, this doesn't have a section at the back where you can write cooking notes for each soup - a big oversight in my view, but not a major problem.

If you like soup, this book is a must - if you don't, this book may just convert you...give it a try.

Technically, it retails for a fairly hefty £14.99 but can be found on AMazon for approximately £9.50 - you will struggle to find a second-hand copy though - but you might be lucky!

Summary: Souperb!!!