Soup

This might seem like an unusual dish, a pasticciata (a layered casserole) of bread and cheese that’s baked, cut into portions, and served in a bowl of hot broth. Yet the tastes and eating pleasure of seuppa ou piat will be completely familiar and welcome to anyone who loves the gratinéed crouton of French onion soup or enjoys a crispy grilled-cheese sandwich with a bowl of rich chicken broth alongside. This is a good dish for company, because you can have both the broth and the pasticciata hot and ready to be put together when your guests come. (Chicken stock is my preference, but a savory vegetable stock or a meaty beef broth is just as good.)

Every region of Italy has a fagioli (bean) soup, often quite filling, with potatoes and pork and either pasta or rice. Interestingly, it was in Trentino–Alto Adige, renowned for the heartiness of its soups, that I had this unexpectedly light bean soup, cooked with fresh apples and delicately spiced. It is vegetarian (also unusual), nourishing, and quite scrumptious. The combination of apples and beans is marvelous, and one of the pleasing features of this recipe is that simply by using less water you can make a great bean-and-apple side dish, a perfect accompaniment to roast pork, duck, or ham.

Hominy, or hulled corn kernels, is the backbone of this Mexican soup (pronounced poh-SOH-lay), which can easily be made vegetarian by using vegetable stock and omitting the pork. Either way, it's best garnished with lots of cilantro, cheese, and lime and served with warm flour tortillas.

Cold soup and hot shrimp—this is a fantastic combination on a warm night. Blending the honeyed sweetness of this summer melon with intensely savory vegetables makes this dish incredibly refreshing. And I give the hot, spicy shrimp a hit of freshness by grilling finely sliced mint right onto them.

Rustic yellow pea soup goes upscale with a foie gras garnish.

Ginger has anti-inflammatory properties and can also calm an upset stomach. We love the heat it adds to this soup.

To save yourself some chopping, look for bags of mixed, pre-cut braising greens, available at some supermarkets. (Buy spinach separately for the gremolata.) Serve with warm bread for a filling main course.

Sip this beefy, faintly sweet broth as is, or, to make it even heartier, simmer diced root vegetables and/or little pastas in it.

When I worked in Gray Kunz's kitchens at Lespinasse, there was an honest-to-God Swiss princess living at the St. Regis Hotel. Her name was Princess Doria, and every night, she would phone down to the kitchen and tell us what she wanted to eat for dinner. In the beginning, Gray would cook for her himself: he was Swiss, she was Swiss, it was a whole Swiss thing going on. But after a while, he got tired of taking her calls, and the job devolved to me and the sous chefs. Every night, that phone would ring, and I would say, "Good evening, Princess," and she would tell me what she wanted to eat that night. Princess Doria wasn't into super-fancy creative cooking: her thing was refined-but-homey. Some- times, for example, it would be a roast pintade for two: I would plate the breast for her, and the thighs for her cat. So I developed some dishes that were just for her. I named them after her: Salad Doria, Chicken Doria. And sometimes on cold winter nights, she would call down and say, "Andrew, I would like some Soup Doria tonight, please." Time passed. I left Lespinasse to travel and cook in France. When I got back to New York, I helped open Le Cirque 2000 in the Palace Hotel. We'd been up and running about two weeks when the kitchen phone rang by my station one night, right in the middle of the busiest part of service. I heard a familiar voice say, in French-accented tones, "Andrew?" Princess Doria on the line. She'd moved on to the Palace right behind me, and she would be pleased, she said, if I would send up some Soup Doria for her. This soup is just Princess Doria's style. It's really a potage—a French minestrone, a chunky winter vegetable soup. I like to sprinkle Parmesan cheese on top and serve it with some crusty, crunchy French bread.

This dish might not be to everyone's (westernized) taste on a hungover morning, and it's also a breakfast with many components—rice, grilled fish, miso soup, pickles and a Japanese-style omelette—and some relatively obscure ingredients. Having said that, this is as clean, wholesome and nutritious as breakfast gets, so if anything is going to make you feel better it may well be this. However, I advise you to steer clear of tofu with a hangover (vegetarians: you may shoot me now); I've used cubes of potato instead.

One rule of thumb governing utensil purchases is to consider the cost of the item in relation to how often you'll use it. Since cherry season is so short, a pitter scores pretty low on the price-use ratio. But the formula is badly flawed, not taking into account how this gadget affects your life when you put it to use. By that reckoning, if owning a cherry pitter moved you to make this soup just once a year, it'd be worth the ten dollars or so you can expect to pay for it.

In this soup, store-bought broth gets depth from ginger and spices.

People often think of turnip soup as bitter and thin, but this one, made with young delicate turnips, is creamy and sweet. Blanching the turnips first removes any bitterness, and the sharpness of the greens makes a delicious counterpoint to the sweetness of the turnips.

This is my version of harira, the national soup of Morocco, which shows up in unending variations from city to city, street stall to street stall, and family to family. It can be vegan, vegetarian, or made with meat—usually lamb. Some cooks add chickpeas, chicken gizzards, or broken-up bits of angel hair pasta. But the result is always unmistakably harira, and that's what makes it so comforting and satisfying. Harira has the inexplicable quality of being both light and filling at the same time, making you feel perfectly content. That's why, besides being the national soup, it's also a religious institution: it's what every family in Morocco eats to break their daily fast all through the monthlong observance of Ramadan. All over the country, for an entire month of sunsets, the first thing the entire population tastes is harira, and breaking the fast with anything else would be like serving Thanksgiving dinner without turkey. During Ramadan here in the States, I fast all day, even though I keep up my normal schedule, shopping in the farmers' market and working in the kitchen. As soon as the sun goes down, I step away from my expediting station and have a quick bowlful of harira to get me through the evening. And on days off, I take home a quart of it to break the fast at my house. The first time you make this, try making a light meal of it, with just some bread and maybe a simple salad. You'll understand what I'm talking about. It's weirdly, wonderfully satisfying—in a way that fills your soul more than your stomach. I make harira with water, not stock, because I think this vegetarian (actually, vegan) version is lighter and cleaner tasting, but you can make it with chicken or lamb stock or half stock and half water. While its flavor is very true to the original, I've played with its preparation. For example, I cook the lentils separately, to keep them from breaking down too much. (My mom called that crazy, but she smiled when she tasted the result.) And if you cook them in the soup, they darken the cooking liquid and give the soup a muddy appearance. The yeast-and-flour mixture is my version of the traditional starter made from fermented flour and water, used exclusively for harira, that you'll find in every Moroccan kitchen. It's easier to manage but has the same effect as that sourdough original, thickening and lightening the soup, and keeping it from separating, while adding a rich, tangy flavor. I wanted to give people a little crunch without adding an extra element, so I took the celery out of its usual place in the sautéed soup base and reintroduced it at the end as a raw garnish. In Morocco, harira is classically served with dates, which add sweetness to balance the soup's acidity. Taste it without the dates, and then try it with them. You'll find it's an entirely different experience. When I first started serving this soup at the restaurant, I'd accompany it with a few beautiful (and expensive) California Medjools on the side. The dates kept coming back uneaten. People just didn't get the idea of savory soup and sweet dates, which drove me nuts. So I thought of a way to work the dates into the soup, rolling them into little balls and adding them as a garnish. People get it now. The date balls are never left uneaten. They're a part of the bigger idea, as they should be. This makes a big batch. That's how I always do it, even at home, because we love to eat it over several nights, and it keeps for up to a week.

Chef Graham Elliot, of restaurants Graham Elliot and Grahamwich in Chicago, shared this recipe as part of a Tree-Trimming Party Menu he created exclusively for Epicurious. Elliot calls this soup one of his favorites. It's a reinvention of a traditional butternut squash soup, using pumpkin pie as inspiration. The pepita streusel makes the "crust" of this soup, while the cinnamon marshmallows carry the spice. Both the soup and streusel can be made up to three days ahead.

A high-in-folate parsnip looks like a funky carrot, but this root veggie is sweeter and slightly nutty.

-Gazpacho can be made ahead and frozen. Defrost in the fridge overnight.
-Mayonnaise is an unusual ingredient, but we like the creaminess it adds to the soup.
-For 2 you will need 4 tomatoes, 1 small cucumber, and 1 small red bell pepper. For 6, you will need 12 tomatoes, 1 cucumber and 1 red pepper.

This traditional Thai-style soup is my personal favorite. I love coconuts, and this soup is all about the coco. I like to use different ages of coconut meat to get varied textures. A more mature nut makes a chunky soup, while a younger one makes a creamy soup. I also like to use a variety of hot peppers: jalapeño, serrano, and even the super-spicy Thai chile, just to get a wide range of spiciness. Some peppers are hot as you eat them, others after you eat them; my favorites are hot only when you stop eating them.

This is an adaptation of a recipe created by our local berry farm.

In winter, the section of our cupboard devoted to onions seems to grow exponentially, filled with all forms of eye-dripping lovelies: red and white onions, shallots, massive white-bulbed scallions. Grilling a sack of onions down to a cereal bowl of caramelized noodles is a rare fall pleasure. And few pillars of French cooking are as widely and voraciously loved as scalding hot onion soup cloaked in a blistering layer of melted Gruyère. But like with many epic dishes canonized by the cuisine of rural folk, vegetarians usually remain wholly uninvited. So how does one mitigate the beef stock in every single recipe of the gooiest of soups? Our "ah-ha moment" was beer. After trying small batches of all three colors of the proverbial tricolore (blue, white, and red) we settled on Chimay Blue, a dubbel style beer that's become a household name for boozers. This so-called grande réserve, or any other basic dubbel, is a super substitute for the essence of animal gore. The malts and sugars play on your tongue in a way that's strikingly similar to the flavor of liquefied fat and tendon.