I always dreamed of writing a soup cookbook. A book of recipes where there’s no need to carefully measure or weigh anything, variations are not only allowable, but encouraged, and cooking times are merely suggestions, and not cast-in-stone instructions to be followed like the ten commandments.

In addition, yes—most soup recipes can be successfully multiplied or divided, and yes—they can be made in advance and often frozen. And if someone adds an extra onion or potato to the pot, the world won’t open and swallow us all up, and life as we know it won’t end.

Aside from clutching our hot water bottles, Parisians keep warm during the winter by eating lots and lots of hot soup.


I make soup in the winter, since it’s easy, warming, and nice to have on hand. (And yes, because it can be frozen.) But I never order soup in restaurants, since I can’t see paying ten bucks for a bowl of something that’s ridiculously easy to make at home.

During the winter, just about every vendor at the markets here sells big wedges of potiron, or pumpkin, which I either oven-roast, or peel and use to make soup out of. I actually just decided that the best way to cook virtually any vegetable not going into soup, especially root vegetables, is to oven-roast it. I’ll skip those fancy gratins or creamy purées in lieu of caramelized nuggets of pumpkin or celery root. But I recently decided to expand my culinary soup horizons when I saw this gnarly céleri-rave that was grown by one of the producteurs at my market. And into my basket it went.

Along with that monster celery root, leeks are available in France very easily, and used frequently, and I’m trying to get into the habit of using them, too. So a bunch went into my basket as well. Oddly, it can be hard to find certain root vegetables in Paris, like parsnips (j’adore…), horseradish (j’adore…), and rutabagas (j’adore aussi…), though. One vegetable vendor told me it was because of their association with the poverty of the war. But now the younger generation is discovering them and they’ve become branché or trendy, which is a movement I’m happy to promote.

Celery Root Soup is very easy to prepare—and cheap. I think the entire pot of soup cost me about two euros, and took me less than ten minutes to put together. You can use onions if you can’t find leeks.

The best way to clean leeks is to cut off the green parts, which the sellers do for you here, making it easier to wend your way home. Then use a knife to make a long vertical slice, lengthwise, cutting the leek in half, but leaving the billy goat beard-like end intact. You then turn the leek a quarter turn, making another lengthwise cut. Then it’s easy to open up the layers and rinse out any grit. If they’re especially gritty, I swish them around in a bowl of cold water, changing the water until it’s clear. There’s nothing worse than eating gritty leeks, except maybe spinach. If that’s too complex (hmmm…maybe I’d better re-think this soup cookbook idea…), just cut the leek into pieces and rinse them thoroughly in cold water, letting them drain well before sautéing Baby Gym.

This soup is also quite healthy and I don’t add cream or anything like that, but instead finish each bowl with a swirl of my freshly-pressed olive oil. I also just discovered white pepper, which I never understood. I mean, if you want pepper, black pepper always seemed like the right choice to me, not insipid white pepper. But then I remembered I had a small packet of white pepper from Penja, which has the spicy bite of black pepper, but wouldn’t leave black speckles in the soup.

Which reminds me of a funny story. (What doesn’t?)

When I was working in a prominent restaurant, a waiter, who’d been working there for well over two years, asked me one day, “David, what are those black specks in the vanilla ice cream hair restoration?”

Pretty surprised that someone wouldn’t know that, I said, “They’re vanilla beans.”

Giving him a moment to let that information sink in, I then turned the tables and asked him a question.

“Um…what did you think they were?”

“Oh, I just thought it was dirt.”

So if you don’t want your guests to think you’re serving dirty soup, you might want to use white pepper, although black is certainly acceptable, as long as you provide a proper explanation iphone bumper.