Sep12009

Gail Carriger’s Favorite Soup of All Time

I’m a bit of a foodie Gentle Reader. It’s one of the skills required of an archaeologist, you never know where you will be or what you will have to eat when making friends with locals. I’ve eaten guinea pig and alpaca in Peru, rabbit in Italy, octopus in Greece. I’ve sampled horse, tripe, brains, awful, sweetmeats, chicha (made the traditional way, yes, that), pulque, and fermented yak milk.

Someone recently asked me the hardest question I’ve ever had to face: what was the most memorable dish you ever ate. I mean I have so many snippets of memory: a tiny hole in the wall in Genoa with gnocchi and pesto so good it made me cry, a fruite de mar risotto in Chinque Terra that was like someone had taken a net across the Mediterranean sea floor and plonked it on a plate, my first Thom Kar Gai, a never ending Tapas experience in Barcelona, Soupa a la Criolia in Peru and posole in Mexico, the seafood sushi salad at Ebisu in San Francisco, raspberry pavlova in a pub in a tiny town in Devon, one special little dumpling in a fancy dim sum restaurant, Leslie’s lemon fluff, and Elle’s mushroom soup, and the flaming deserts at Allegias. There is that infamous alpaca wrapped in bacon in a white wine mushroom cream sauce from Macondo’s in Cuzco that’s the thing I want to eat before I die.

And then I remembered The One.

The Tate Modern, a few months after it opened, had this great little cafeteria way up high, with an awesome view of London and I wandered in and ordered the celeriac soup. It came with a wedge of Stilton cheese bread and a pear compote plopped in the bottom of the bowl. It was miraculously good. That’s the one. I don’t believe there is a One of me relationship-wise, but that soup was my perfect match.

Quote of the Day:
“Worries go down better with soup.”
~ Jewish Proverb

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Posted by Gail Carriger

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