Soups

I like starting a dinner with soup.  And of soup, there are various.
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There’s cream soup – a combination puréed so smoothly that it’s cream-like. It may even contain cream. Needless to say, mine generally does. It has a silky mouth-feel (You might need to help it  with a little thickening such as an egg yolk or roux).
 
There’s consommé (ah, if only) – the most elegant are clear, perhaps with something delicate floating.  It might be a simple chicken broth with a few floats of white meat.  It could be a miso soup with silken tofu cubes or a Thai soup, clear, sweet and hot, dotted with herbs and straw mushrooms.
 
There’s chunky soup – with nourishing bits in it like minestrone or a Swedish bean & pork hock soup, which could be a meal.
 
Then there’s the dreaded thick soup or what I’ll politely call hippy soup, more like a thick gruel, so thick that a spoon could stand in it.  This soup needs thinning.   It is just not nice in the mouth. If you want the soup to be a meal, do chunky.
 
If following a recipe slavishly, you may have to add more liquid like "tap stock" (i.e. water) or stock or cream.
 
The travel writer Paul Theroux scathingly describes his mother’s cooking (in Mother Land) – “soup so thick a mouse could have trotted across it”.  This is an image good enough to remind you to check your soup's consistency.

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