Soup Mother
I saw a bunch of people posting on Facebook about a “soup mother.” I assumed that it was a mother… who made soup? Which begged the question of why the soup maker needed her parental status in her name. But a quick Google session brought me here, to the idea of a soup mother.
It is sort of the soup equivalent to sourdough starter. Sort of. You take the remains of one soup and you add more ingredients to it to create the next soup. More like soup tag, maybe. Soup never goes to waste because one of the ingredients of your current soup is the leftovers of your last soup.
We did something similar with Stanley Tucci’s marinara sauce. We made it, and it was fine. But then his pasta e fagioli called for two cups of his marinara sauce. So we used the leftovers of the night before to make the soup, which was fantastic. In a true soup mother, we would take the pasta e fagioli and turn it into a vegetable soup by adding more stock and vegetables.
This appeals to my desire for zero waste, though I wonder how it works once you’ve added ingredients that don’t work in the direction you want to take the soup. Can you back yourself into a soup corner?
3 comments
I grew up with this (Depression-era father). Yes, it can be awful.
My sister and I took possibly decades to be able to think of soup with anything other than disgust after leaving home. (I’m still traumatized from the bean sprouts era back when I was like… 6 years old?) I don’t know why it’s suddenly trendy. *shudders*
I couldn’t get past the leaving it out at room temp part. I keep my sourdough starter in the fridge and I’ve had to resurrect it more than once by scraping off the hooch etc…but with soup it seems even refrigerated you’d have to use it to make something new every few days. I just read a story today about a college student who ate some leftover rice and noodles that weren’t properly refrigerated and with a few hours he has to have both legs amputated…
Well, I feel better about leaving the soup on the counter overnight to cool instead of forcing the refrigerator to do the work, anyway. Whenever I make soup, it goes into the fridge for a couple days, and then whatever’s left goes to the freezer. I’ll have to introduce my husband to the concept of the soup mother, as I don’t like soup and rarely eat it. He can doctor it up in whatever way he likes.