Product Description

When I said I was working on a soup book, the response was often, “Oh, I love soup!” People enthuse about soup in a way that’s so heartwarming it makes me feel as if I’m in the right camp... The soups in this book are based on vegetables, and many of these recipes are new ones for me. But some are soup classics, by which I mean some of those that have stood the test of time in my kitchen, (Quinoa, Corn, and Spinach Chowder) and those that are classics in the culture (Boston-Style Black Bean Soup). I’ve tried to streamlined these dishes as much as possible without sacrificing goodness, so that you can easily enjoy them in your own kitchen. I hope you do enjoy making these soups and add them, one by one, to your repertoire.

—from the Introduction

In Vegetable Soups from Deborah Madison’s Kitchen, America’s favorite vegetarian cookbook author presents more than 100 inventive and straightforward soup recipes guaranteed to satisfy appetites all year long.

Deborah Madison has shown millions of Americans how to turn vegetables and other healthful ingredients into culinary triumphs. In her newest collection of recipes, She serves up a selection of soups ranging from stylish first courses to substantial one-bowl meals.

Madison begins with a soup-making primer and streamlined recipes for vegetable stocks and broths (such as the Hearty Mushroom Broth), which serve as the foundation for many of the recipes that follow, for those who wish to make their own. Soups like the Mexican Tomato Broth with Avocado and Lime can start a supper or stand alone as a simple, light meal. Cooks looking for heartier choices will find satisfying dishes such as Potato and Green Chile Stew with Cilantro Cream or grain-based soups like the Wild Rice Chowder. Organized by seasons, the recipes make the most of the produce–from a springtime Fennel and Almond Soup with Saffron and Ricotta Dumplings to a deeply flavorful autumnal Roasted Squash, Pear and Ginger Soup. When time just isn’t available and prepared soups take the place of home made, Madison offers a battery of suggestions for how to make them your own with simple additions from delicious oils and herbs to an invigorating Cilantro Salsa.

Featuring fifty stunning full-color photographs by Laurie Smith, serving suggestions, wine notes, and a host of ideas for creative finishing touches including caramelized pear “croutons” and souffléd cheese toasts, this friendly soup lover's guide gives the reader a hundred delicious ways to enjoy the benefits and flavors of vegetables by the bowlful throughout the seasons.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18036 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-07
• Released on: 2006-02-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Madison continues her quest to make vegetarian food palatable to all, banking on her belief that soups are "almost universally popular." Still, though the author of Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone mostly refrains from using tofu, few of her recipes are as "uncontrived" as she claims: for instance, Roasted Fall Tomato Soup is vastly better than anything canned, but the curry, saffron and quinoa swirled in may intimidate the palates of less ambitious cooks. The other recipes—including hearty broths, bean soups, lentil soups, grain-thickened soups and soups for each season—either riff on classics or take wholly innovative directions. This approach will attract experienced cooks bored with the usual noodle soups or minestrones, and who have access to top-quality spices and vegetables, plus plenty of time and patience. While not all of the recipes are demanding, readers who are willing to commit the necessary effort will be rewarded by rich layers of taste in elegant selections like Rice and Golden Turnip Soup with Fontina Cheese. An excellent opening section on stock sets the stage, and in the margins Madison provides helpful tips on ingredient buying, preparation, presentation and wine accompaniment. Her fans, as well as soup connoisseurs, are sure to lap this book up eagerly. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Deborah Madison's most recent cookbook is Vegetarian Suppers from Deborah Madison's Kitchen. She is the author of Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone and The Savory Way, both of which were named the Julia Child Cookbook of the Year by the IACP. Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone also received a James Beard Award, as did Local Flavors, and This Can't Be Tofu! was a Beard nominee. The Greens Cookbook, now a classic, was her first book. A contributor to many magazines, Deborah Madison received the M.F.K. Fisher Mid-Career Award from Les Dames d'Escoffier in 1994. She lives in New Mexico with her husband, Patrick McFarlin.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Avocado Soup
with herbs, slivered radishes, and pistachios
Makes 3 ½ cups

Avocado pureed with buttermilk (low-fat) and yogurt (with the cream on top) yields a pale green soup laced with masses of minced herbs, textured with cucumber, and garnished with slivered radishes, herbs, and green pistachios. All in all, it’s a fine soup for a hot day, and although the recipe makes just a scant quart, it will be enough for four or more servings.

2 cups low-fat buttermilk
1 cup yogurt, preferably whole-milk
1 large avocado, peeled and pitted
1 cucumber, peeled and seeded
1 large garlic clove
Sea salt and freshly ground pepper
3 slender scallions, white parts plus a bit of the green, finely minced
3 tablespoons chopped dill
1 tablespoon snipped chives
1 tablespoon minced marjoram or oregano
1 tablespoon minced tarragon
1 tablespoon chopped cilantro
½ jalapeno chile, seeded and chopped
Zest and juice of 1 lime
½ teaspoon sweetener, such as agave syrup (page 140), to taste

To Finish
Finely sliced chives and chive blossoms
Thinly slivered radishes
Dill, mint, and cilantro sprigs
1/3 cup shelled pistachios or walnuts

1. Puree the buttermilk, yogurt, avocado, and a quarter of the peeled cucumber in a blender until smooth, then pour it into a bowl.
2. Mash the garlic with ½ teaspoon salt and stir it into the puree along with the scallions, herbs, chile, and lime zest. Season to taste with salt, pepper, lime juice, and sweetener, if needed. Seed and finely dice the remaining cucumber and add to the soup. Cover and refrigerate until well chilled. Just before serving, taste and correct the seasonings.
3. Ladle the soup into bowls, then cover the surface with the chives, radishes, herb sprigs, and pistachios.

Agave Syrup

For those who don’t like using refined sugar, organic or not, agave syrup offers and alternative. It’s sweeter than sugar but has a low glycemic index. While there’s more to it than pure sweetness, its flavor is not a pronounced as that of honey or maple syrup. Derived from agave, the same plant used for making tequila, the liquid form of the syrup is easy to add to foods as it dissolves instantly. Agave syrup can be found in natural food stores.

Cool Cucumber Soup
with a cucumber-herb relish
Makes 3 to 4 cups

This herb-green froth of a soup can be whipped together in a blender in moments, then chilled until serving. Served in glasses, it makes a refreshing way to begin a summer dinner, and it’s a great convenience to have on hand in the refrigerator for a quick lunch or an afternoon bite.

A cucumber soup can be led in many directions. You can allow dill to predominate and garnish it with dill flowers, use a mixture of herbs as is done here, or use any one of them alone. I find a mixture most interesting–dill, basil, cilantro, and chives with a leaf or two of lovage, the perfect cucumber herb in my opinion. If you want the snap of chile, add minced jalapeno and lime.

The Soup
2 pounds cucumbers
1 cup buttermilk, whole-milk yogurt, sour cream, or a mixture
½ cup coarsely chopped herbs, including basil, dill, cilantro, and lovage
Sea salt and freshly ground pepper
Zest and juice of 2 lemons, or to taste

The cucumber relish
2 tablespoons minced chives or scallions
1 tablespoon minced dill
2 tablespoons each finely chopped basil and cilantro
1 lovage leaf, finely slivered
2 teaspoons olive oil

1. Peel and seed the cucumbers. Use one to make a cup of small dice and set it aside, then coarsely chop the rest. Puree in a blender or food processor with the buttermilk, chopped herbs, ½ teaspoon salt, and the zest and juice from 1 lemon. Chill.
2. Just before serving, toss the reserved diced cucumber with the herbs, a few pinches of salt, the olive oil, and the remaining lemon juice and zest.
3. Taste the soup for salt, pepper, and acidity, adding more lemon juice if needed, then serve in chilled bowls with the cucumber-herb relish.

You can make the soup ultra-lean if you use buttermilk or richer with sour cream. I fall in between, using buttermilk along with at least a cup of the best whole-milk yogurt I can find, such as Strauss Family Organic Creamery.

White Gazpacho
of almonds and melon (ajo blanco)
Makes 2 2/3 cups

A silky texture and the presence of garlic, salt, and the melon (or large green grapes) make a concoction that’s at once sweet, salty, and pungent. The first time I had this, in Spain, I was immediately reminded of those perfumed Arab almond-based drinks scented with orange-flower water, to which this is related. Both are luxurious given the quantity of nuts and the labor of pounding and straining, even if that is now done by a food processor. Because this is a rich soup, it can be served in quite small portions; this amount will serve six or more.

1 large slice white country bread or baguette
¾ cup almonds
2 garlic cloves, not too large, peeled
Sea salt
1 tablespoon sherry vinegar, plus extra to taste
6 tablespoons olive oil, preferably Spanish
2 cups ice water
2 cups diced fragrant green melon, such as Galia or Passport, or 24 large seedless green grapes, peeled and halved

1. Put the bread on a plate, drizzle several tablespoons of water over it, and set aside.
2. Bring several cups of water to a boil, add the almonds, turn off the heat, and let stand for 1 minute. Drain, then rinse with cold water. Pinch off the skins with your fingers.
3. Grind the almonds in a food processor with the garlic and add ½ teaspoon salt until reduced to fine crumbs. Add the bread and vinegar and continue working until it is as smooth as possible. It may clump together, but you can’t overwork it. With the machine running, slowly pour in the oil, followed by the ice water. Be sure to scrape down the sides as the ground almonds can stick to them. Pour the soup through a fine strainer set over a bowl, and gently press the liquid out with a rubber scraper so that the soup is silky smooth. Discard the solids and refrigerate the soup until it’s good and cold, 2 to 3 hours. Taste for salt and vinegar. The sharpness of the vinegar should just be detectable.
4. Serve small portions of the soup, dividing the melon or grapes among them.

This rich soup wants some bubbles to contrast with its creaminess. A Spanish cava would be an obvious and good choice.

Customer Reviews

Souper Book. Buy it, esp. if you have no other Madison books
`Vegetable Soups from Deborah Madison's Kitchen' is a title loaded with significance, for a book by the foremost writer on vegetarian cooking techniques, Deborah Madison. The first implication, which reading the book bears out, is that this is all about vegetarian, but not necessarily vegan soup recipes. As in all her books, Ms. Madison makes liberal use of milk products and eggs, with no apologies for that fact. The second implication is that Madison is turning her name, or more exactly `Deborah Madison's Kitchen' into a brand name, in much the same way as Mark Bittman has turned his `How to Cook Everything' and Rachael Ray has turned '30 Minute Meals' into a brand, with the hopes that brand recognition rather than the quality of the book's contents will get you to buy this book.

On the one hand, I can state categorically that this is the one of the best books I have seen on soups at all, let alone its being the very best book I have seen on vegetarian soups. I will begin by exploring why this is true and later consider how much of this book is original rather than simply being a copy from Madison's earlier excellent books.

The other vegetarian soup book I have reviewed is Paulette Mitchell's `...a beautiful bowl of soup' which is aimed at giving us a collection of `the best vegetarian recipes'. This book is very, very good, and I gave it a high rating compared to the dozen or so other soup books I have reviewed, but Madison's book is better. Both books are excellent at giving good general advice on soup cookery, but Madison's book is superior, in that she goes far beyond Mitchell in repeating her excellent doctrine of creating stocks and broths to enhance the primary ingredients from which the soups will ultimately be made. Madison did, not invent this principle I'm sure. You see it in hundreds of recipes for serious soup recipes, such as when one uses the liqueur collected from steaming open clams as the basis of a clam chowder or using corn cobs to create a corny broth for a corn soup. Madison has generalized this principle and enhanced it with lots of advice on what stock ingredients go best with what. She certainly covers all the obvious stuff such as mirepoix components, fennel, mushrooms, celeriac, and the like. But she also suggests that many nuts, not just chestnuts, are excellent soup and stock ingredients. Madison also does a great job of selling vegetable stocks for being easy and quick to make and, with the right ingredients, almost as bracing as their carnivorous cousins.

While Madison states that many of these recipes are original, there are also a whole lot of recipe types that look very familiar to me. For example, there are lots of bean soups, dried split pea soup, fresh pea soup, squash soup, chestnut soup, cabbage and kale soups, corn soup, cream and roasted tomato soups, and a bean and pasta soup (the old Italian pasta fagiole chestnut!). Like Mitchell, Madison gives lots of variations on some of the more popular types of soups. On the whole, it seems, however, that Madison's soup recipes are just a bit more interesting, with just a bit deeper insight into the interplay of tastes and textures. Comparing the chestnut soup recipes from the two books, Mitchell gives us a pretty ordinary chestnut soup, while Madison gives us a much more interesting variation, adding both fennel and lentils for a bit of sweetness and body. This is very similar to my favorite chestnut soup recipe from Daniel Boulud, who adds apples (great seasonal match, of course) to his recipe for sweetness.

Another very nice feature of Madison's book is that it is organized by ingredient, consistency, and by season. With almost 500 cookbooks, and at least 12 soup cookbooks from which to choose, I find the books organized by season are more interesting sources to find a suitable soup than those organized by ingredient or consistency (most of the time).

I cannot overlook the fact that Ms. Madison has used photographs of some very original pottery to enhance the presentation of her soups. The contribution of her ceramic artist friends is so great, she dedicates the book to these two artisans.

The greatest caution against buying this book is the fact that so much of its general material has appeared in earlier Madison books, most especially the great `Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone', which for me ranks as one of the five very best cookbooks I have ever read, let alone the all time best general vegetarian cookbook. Much of the advice on stockmaking and Madison's ten (10) steps for making soup come from the 50-page chapter on stocks and soups in this book. The new book, however, does include many soup recipes which are not in the earlier book, and where there is overlap of principle ingredient, the new book's recipe is generally more elaborate and more interesting for entertaining.

In all, if you own all of Deborah Madison's earlier books, you will encounter a lot of redundancy. If, on the other hand, you own no Madison books, and you happen to be fond of soups, I cannot recommend this book more strongly. It may not have the great number of recipes as James Peterson's `Splendid Soups', but it is by far the best source for those who wish to be better at ad libbing soup making. This may be comparable to Louis Armstrong's lessons on how to improvise with a coronet.

Oh, the joy.....
.....Of my whole family thinking I am the "Soup Goddess" since I bumped into this book in my local library.I am a vegetarian, but my husband isn't, and neither is his family, but I do love to cook for them,but they are all too easy to scare with tofu, tempeh,roots and twigs they haven't even heard of.(things I do enjoy though.)But ever since I have been cooking tasty soups from this book, they love everything I make.It is not a 15 minute meal book,thank god, because there is something to taking one's time, and cooking with love and care.The fall and winter soups,especially the roasted vegetable ones are sooo goood!They do require fresh veggies, but you can still use canned tomatoes, if you don't have fresh, canned beans occasionaly, and the food comes out great.The idea of making the stock from the trimmings is great too,since most of the time they would be thrown away anyway, so why not make the soup tastier with them.I have a small kitchen and no place for gadgets,but I was able to use this book without those,and the outcome was always delicious, fragrant, wholesome food. And I have not found one single recipe in this book that was not superb.I mean, how many times does it happen, that you buy a book, and most of the stuff is either too complicated, too simple, too blah?Even Goldilocks would be happy with this one!Every single thing I have tried,which is most of the cold weather soups came out even better than I thought it would.Of course I had to get my own edition because I could not bare to part with this book when it was time to take it back.Since than I got a few more books from Ms Madison, but this was the first and so it is special.Good luck,and enjoy!

Vegetable Soups from Deborah Madison's Kitchen.
Very nicely illustrated and laid out however for anyone in smaller towns some of the ingredients may not be available. It would be helpful to give a directory of the more unusual ingredients,a description of them and perhaps a buying guide.