Simmer

I relish the frugality and bonhomie of a bowl of onion soup. This is slightly richer and thicker than the one in The Kitchen Diaries, possibly for colder weather. I don’t often use flour to thicken a soup but in this case it produces a particularly velvety texture.

Like asparagus, leeks produce a particularly subtle risotto. The crucial point is not to let them color. Cook them over low heat, with a lid on if you wish, or maybe with a piece of wax paper on top. Either way they must not brown.

To balance the sweetness of leeks, we can use a little white wine vinegar, especially tarragon, or lemon juice. The addition of either removes any risk of the dish cloying. The recipe that follows is one of my all-time favorites for a good, easy midweek supper. What especially appeals is that although the sauce tastes rich and almost creamy, it has no butter or cream in it at all.

Good cooking often comes from simply going with what is around at the time. Ingredients that are in season at the same time tend to go together—in this case, the last of a hat trick of leek soups made with all that is left in the depleted winter vegetable patch.

Onions have always had a slightly awkward relationship with fish. They seem particularly ungainly and rough edged alongside the white varieties or shellfish. Shallots work better, with their milder notes and less significant dose of sugar, but of all the alliums it is the leek that marries most successfully. The white of the leek has an elegance and subtlety that is unlikely to overpower any fish you put it with. In a soup or pie, it dances with the piscine ingredients where an onion would tread on their toes. Chowder is traditionally a hearty bowl of food. The one I make with mussels and bacon is a short step away from the big clam and potato numbers I have eaten in Boston, in that it is somewhat lighter and less creamy, but it is still essentially a big soup for a cool day.

The potato and the leek are happy bedfellows, as anyone who has eaten a good vichysoisse will know. Softer than potato and onion, more graceful than a chowder, warm potato and leek soup has a peaceful, almost soporific quality. A silky, cool-weather soup that somehow manages to taste creamy and rich with only the smallest amount of butter and no cream in it.

Kale is just one possibility for bulking out this supper of pork balls and broth. I use it because I like the fullness of its leaves with the smooth pork balls. You could use any member of the greens family, and particularly Savoy cabbage. The important bit is not to overcook the greens.

The soup-stew, a bowl of spoon-tender meat, beans, and aromatics that partly collapse into the surrounding stock, is one of the suppers I hold dearest. More often taken as lunch, this is food that feeds the soul as much as the belly, enriching, calming, quietly energizing. This is the cooking on which to lavish the cheapest cuts going, the fatty, bony lumps that butchers sell at reduced prices: mostly cuts from the neck and lower legs. Ingredients whose sole purpose is to give body to the liquid in which they cook. A knuckle end of prosciutto would be a sound addition here, if your local deli will sell you one. Most will charge very little. Butchers are an excellent source of ham bones with much meat attached. Failing that, I use a lump of ham, complete with its thick layer of fat.

I have long made a simple artichoke soup by adding the scrubbed tubers to softened onions, pouring over stock, and then simmering until the artichokes fall apart. I often add a little lemon juice, bay leaves, and sometimes a thumb of ginger. I blitz it in the blender, then stir in lots of chopped parsley. Some might introduce cream at this point but I honestly don’t think it’s necessary. The soup is velvety enough. It has become a staple in this kitchen over the last few winters; its warm nuttiness is always welcome on a steely-skied January day. Late in the winter of 2008, possibly having had one day too many of what Beth Chatto calls “dustbin-lid skies,” I changed the soup’s tone by adding a stirring of bright green spinach. As often happens, it came about by accident—a bowl of creamed spinach left over from a boiled ham lunch—added to the soup just to use it up. The magic in this soup is in the marriage of earthy cold-weather food and a shot of mood-lifting chlorophyll. Spring is obviously stirring.

A damp January morning (2006) and a walk round the vegetable patch reveals only two herbs in reasonable condition: rosemary, which loses some of its potency in winter, and parsley, most of which has collapsed in a dead faint to the ground. I value both enormously, feeling even now that they have an edge on the imported basil and spindly thyme in the markets. Both respond well to earthy winter cooking. Chilled to the bone (I find it’s the damp that gets to me more than the temperature), I come in and use the parsley where it really matters: in a pan of braised artichokes and pork sausage, whose brown depths I freshen up with Italian lemons and, at its side, some crisp and chewy greens.

Fava beans are gentle, soothing, calm (particularly so when they have been skinned), a vegetable without the vibrancy of spinach or even peas. Surely we don’t always want vegetables to be full of fireworks? Rather than fight this mild character with an addition of spice or bright tastes, I go along with it, and often serve the beans as a side dish with cream and perhaps a stirring of parsley. A dish as soporific as it is beautiful. Some poached ham would be nice here, as might a piece of lightly cooked white fish. Though I would be more than satisfied with some triangles of hot brown toast. Should you happen to have any summer savory in the herb bed, this is your chance to use it.

Green stuff—asparagus, nettles, peas, spinach, and fava beans—adds life and vigor to the seemingly endless calm of a shallow plate of risotto. My first attempt found me convinced that I didn’t need to skin the beans. In theory it works, but the skins interfere with the harmony of stock, rice, and cheese and add an unwelcome chewiness. I am not sure you should ever need to chew a risotto.

Hot, clean, and vibrant, a mouth-popping stew for scooping up with soft, warm naan or, if you prefer, rice. Should you want something richer and less spicy, then stir in a carton of yogurt, about 1 cup (250g), at the end and simmer for a further seven or eight minutes.

A lovely, deeply flavored vegetable stew. This is one of those dishes that is all the better for a day in the fridge, during which time the flavors seem to mellow. I have kept it quite spicy but the final seasoning will depend on how hot your chiles are, and you will need to adjust it accordingly. Something to take your time over. I eat it with steamed basmati rice.

Sicily’s cooks make much of the eggplant. They fry it in crisp disks, with mint and vinegar; bake it with tomato sauce and salty caciocavallo cheese; stuff it with anchovies, parsley, and capers; or grill it over charcoal before seasoning with garlic and oregano. Occasionally, they will roll up a thick jam of eggplant in soft disks of dough like a savory strudel, called scaccie, while all the time matching it to the Arab-influenced exotica of their cupboards: anchovies, olives, fennel, mint, pomegranates, currants, and pine nuts. The thin, Turkish eggplant with the bulbous end is the one they prefer, though you could use any shape for their famous caponata, the rich sweet-sour stew braised with celery, golden raisins, vinegar, and bell peppers. I can eat this fragrant, amber slop at any time of year, but somehow I always end up making it when the sun is shining, eating it outside with flat, chewy bread and maybe some grilled sardines flecked with torn mint leaves and lemon. If you make it the day before, its character—salty, sweet, and sour—will have time to settle itself.

On the right day, a deep bowl of lentil soup is all the food I need. The homey, almost spare quality satisfies me in a way fancier recipes cannot. The undertones of frugality, poverty even, are avoided by rich seasonings of unsmoked bacon, herbs, and good stock. The backbone of earthiness is given a fresh top note with mint and lemon juice. You can keep your beef Wellington.

Some steamed or boiled potatoes, slightly fluffy at the edges, would be my choice of accompaniment here, with a plate of large, soft lettuce leaves for mopping up the juices.

Long associated with the finale of the Christmas meal, Stilton and celery is a fine combination and there is every reason to turn it into a soup. I’m not sure it matters which blue cheese you use but the saltier types tend to be more interesting here. A good Stilton will work well enough, but something with more punch—say Picos, Roquefort, Stichelton, or Cashel Blue—would get my vote, as would good old Danish Blue. Cream is usually a given with celery soup, but I am not sure you need it.

If a cauliflower is happiest under a comfort blanket of cream and cheese, we can run with the idea, dropping the cheese and introducing some of the milder, more fragrant spices such as coriander and cardamom into the cream instead. With its toasted cashews and crisp finish of spiced fried onions, this is a mild dish, so I see no reason to soften the blow with steamed rice, preferring instead to eat it with a crunchy salad of Belgian endive and watercress (or some such crisp, hot leaf ), using it to wipe the sauce from my plate.

You could measure my life in bowls of soup. Each New Year’s Day brings a pot of lentil soup (a good-luck symbol throughout much of Europe); pea and mint soup is to celebrate early summer; cabbage soup for colds and crash diets; parsnip soup for frosty weekends; chicken broth to cleanse my soul. You probably don’t want to know about the parsimonious soup-stew I put together from the weekly fridge cleanup. I do believe in the power of soup to restore our spirits and to strengthen and protect us. Steaming, frugal, yet curiously luxurious, soup replaces many a meal in this house. With a good loaf on the bread board and fresh salad in the bowl, I have no shame in serving soup to visitors (only amusement in watching them looking round in vain for a main course). I first came up with the idea of this soup years ago, and have watched it do the rounds, yet it has never made it into any of my own books until now. It has something of the Welsh rarebit about it.