Beef Borscht at Cafe Polonia |
Like black ice, soup season comes around when it’s bone-chilling and dark and you’re craving something warm to curl your hands around. Nearly every ethnicity and cuisine has a hot, soul-thawing soup in its arsenal; soup bends to every spice, meat, vegetable, legume, and grain, and its components depend only on the whim, wit, and wisdom of the chef. The best thing about soups? Other than in big industrial kitchens, soup recipes change every day: a little of that left over from the night before, the extra vegetables the prep chef chopped, the last links of homemade sausage in the fridge. The art is in blending the flavors so that, as in a successful chemistry experiment, the end result explodes with flavor.Still, while almost every restaurant in the city has some sort of soup on its menu, only a few have raised it to a high art. For one thing, soup isn’t usually a dish for the high-end restaurants. (“It’s hard to make a soup meal a worthwhile business strategy unless you shave truffles on top,” notes Domani’s Rene Michelena.) So although there are many highly refined soups with complicated, labor-intensive reductions, some of the best soup can be found at ethnic restaurants and smaller bistros, where a bowl of soup isn’t just a warm-up, but the whole show. (A plea to chef Laura Brennan, the soup queen of Boston, who just shuttered her Caffè Umbra in the South End: my fervent hope is that she finds a new place to start ladling out her warm, wonderful soups –– and soon.)
This being New England, we obviously have fantastic fish stews, soups, and chowders. They may all look similar, but they differ significantly in their subtleties. Think of the thick, stand-up-your-spoon-in-it fish chowder at the No Name on Northern Avenue, the famous inaugural clam chowder at Legal Sea Foods, the chockfull-of-clams chowder at Summer Shack, and the delicate clam chowder at Turner Fisheries. Winter winners all, and while they might be visually identical, the trick is in the nuanced spicing, the bacon or ham for flavoring, the size of the chunks of potato and celery, the freshness of the fish. Enough with the clams? Visit the North End for Neptune Oyster’s oyster stew, a sort of seafood minestrone that’ll keep you cozy enough for a walk along the waterfront. As for fish soups and stews, the non-white versions are just the thing when you want soup that sips more than it slides. The Portuguese have their version of fish soup, and it’s done well at Atasca in Cambridge. So do the Mexicans — try Olé in Inman Square.
Still, it’s the Italians who may win top honors for making soup into an art form. Any respectable bowl of Italian soup will hit all the food groups, with beans, vegetables, pasta, and a sprinkling of cheese fighting for space in every spoonful. And Italian soup goes way beyond minestrone. There’s the classic Italian wedding soup (Caliterra sometimes makes a mean one): chicken broth with orzo and little meatballs. And there are the thick, tomato concoctions, often with vegetables or homemade pasta, like the ones at Carlo’s Cucina Italiana in Allston. Or there are the creamy bisques, which often feature puréed butternut squash or pumpkin. Domani has Zucca, a Long Island pumpkin purée cut with ricotta and homemade chicken broth and served with fresh sage and amaretto cookies.
