Real Soup

I am a cook. All day I clank and fling and measure and stir in a small kitchen so that my large family might eat well and be nourished.

I began learning to cook because I deplored boxed food, I refused to starve, and I couldn't afford restaurant fare on a student's budget. So I collected money from my friends and fed them.

Then we all washed the dishes and made coffee and spent the long night expounding theories, maligning the government, critiquing various literary movements, falling in love, plotting what we felt were serious and erudite graffiti campaigns, sailing through the stars.

The food itself, whether plain or fancy, was more the launchpad to the evening than the evening itself. It was the initial point of authentic communion between people.

My standards as a cook stem from my mother and her mother, both superb cooks, given less to instruction than to admonishments such as, "Don't stir that _ fluff it!"

My father's mother was a school cook who brought home the leftovers to her rowdy brood and whose cakes, according to my father, could and did float out of the oven and over the streets of Philadelphia.

My ethics and views about cooking are the same as they are about life in general. I like the real thing. I like it fresh and tasty. I don't like too many complications. And my delight is sharing it with people I love.

All this, plus my inclinations to poetics and blarney, bring me to this space, where I shall offer you a few thoughts and some good recipes to try.

I consider soup a power food. It also has the faculty of using leftovers discretely, translating the vegetable drawer into a lovely light meal with which to end the day. Real Soup starts with a homemade broth that takes, truly, very little time to prepare. I often do this part while I'm helping clean up after dinner so that the following night's meal is smugly prepared and underway ahead of time.

Put a 4-quart kettle on to boil and start tossing coarsely chopped vegetables into it right away. Celery leaves and butts, stray potatoes, mushrooms, garlic, parsley stems, chicken backs, defatted, limp carrots, bay leaf if you like it.

Avoid green peppers and the entire cabbage family _ broccoli, cauliflower and their kin _ they will bring a strong, overcooked flavor to the broth.

When this comes to a boil, turn it down and simmer for an hour. Strain the vegetables out, cool and refrigerate for the next day. If you let this mixture sit and steep, a stale taste will creep in, partly because of the slowed cooling.

Using about 4 cups of the prepared stock, add 2-4 diced but not peeled new red potatoes, 3 stalks fresh celery, 1/2 onion, diced, 1/2 bunch parsley finely chopped, 1 carrot grated, and maybe some fresh garlic and a few whole mushrooms. Simmer and stir until the celery and potatoes are tender.

Now put about 1/4 Cup white flour into a pint jar, fill it with milk, cover it and shake it like mad.

When the lumps are gone, add this to the brew, along with another cup or so of milk, a pat of butter, a little half and half _ whatever sounds good to you. Cream cheese. Cayenne for color. Bacon bits. Chopped scallions. A big teaspoon of dill weed.

Stir it often now to help the broth thicken evenly, and add a scant teaspoon of salt and some black pepper to taste. Now you have Potato Soup.

To transform it to Corn Chowder, add, about 10 minutes before serving, corn cut off of 2-4 cobs of good sweet fresh corn or 1 1/2 cups frozen.

Red peppers, diced and added at the end, grated sharp cheddar cheese, fresh-snipped chives or parsley, little chunks of ham, add to your welcoming tureen.

Hot, steaming chowder, speckled with goodies, a loaf of rye bread, and a large green salad make an elegant, simple meal you can linger over while you discuss with your loved ones the world situation, and slowly toss about the stories and reflections of the day as it closes.