Somewhere in my 20s, somewhere in London, I went on a date with a nice young man. We were standing on a balcony in a club watching the frenetic action on the dance floor, trying to think of things to say to each other.
These days, I can always think of something stupid to say in an awkward silence, because I don’t really care if people think I’m weird or inappropriate. Those days, I was still clinging to the hope that I might pull off being ‘cool’, and kept my mouth shut, cool conversation- starters eluding me.
“I’d love a bowl of soup right now” he said.
“Oh,” I replied.
“A nice armchair and a bowl of soup”
Now, if I were on a date at a noisy club, today, I would appreciate the sentiment. I would probably grab his hand and drag him out of the club to find a nice pair of armchairs somewhere quiet and picturesque and we could have a lovely chat, and then maybe get married.1
But in my 20s, I didn’t want to hear that my date already wanted a nice sit down. Worse was his desire for soup, this grown man wanting liquid food. It put me on the back foot. He wasn’t even Portuguese.
It didn’t help his cause that he added that he liked to ‘people watch’. “I like to people watch” rings alarm bells in me. Not because watching people is somehow off. We all watch people. I watch people all the time. I’m writing this next to the window and, every other sentence, I look up and watch the people at the metro stop or the people going into the gym or the mercearia or the weed shop. There’s a fella out there right now that looks like Bernard Cribbins if Bernard Cribbins were still alive, in his fifties and thought that shiny red trainers and a tight flat-top and a goatee were just the thing. Stating proudly that you “like to people watch” sounds like a desperate bid to sound interesting and quirky. It’s as interesting and quirky as tying your shoelaces. Try saying “I like to watch people” instead. Once you hear how that sounds, you’ll stop saying it.
There were no further dates with this perfectly nice young man. The chemistry wasn’t there, and I couldn’t get past the soup thing.
Soup and I have beef. I’ve never really been a fan, but then I moved to Portugal.
The other day, I wrote that there are no vegetable side dishes in general Portuguese cuisine. This is why: 98.3% of them are in the fucking soup.
1999, London. My half-Portuguese daughter was born. We moved to Portugal two months later, shortly before the new millennium began, and we lived 300 metres from my mother-in-law.
I was planning on dealing with my little bundle of joy in my own way, trying to get her into a routine (routine is anathema to me, but I wanted to at least try), and getting her into bed in the early evening, like I thought everybody in the world did. This was precisely the time in the evening when we would get a visit, almost every day, so I had to give up trying to do the British thing of “mummy time” in the evenings. Putting my foot down wasn’t an option.
Soon, it was time to get the baby onto solids. I partially burned the first thing I ever cooked her, just some carrot and something purée, because I was being observed. Because I was being observed and still didn’t have the Portuguese to blab or blag or say “please let me do this on my own, I am, fact 30 years old, and not a moron”, I blustered my way through and gave the baby a spoon of it. She turned her nose up, of course, and my mother-in-law grabbed the spoon and tasted it.
“No wonder she won’t eat it, it’s burned!” The suspicion that the English are helpless fools was now cemented in her head as a full blown fact.
After that first burnt purée, things improved, as I would only cook when I knew I’d be alone. I am a good cook. I am not a good cook when I am being watched. There’s a benefit to our kitchen, now, being ridiculously narrow, because I can tell kitchen hoverers that they must go and drink wine somewhere else, because they might get splattered with boiling oil or stabbed with a very big knife if they stay in the kitchen, instead of the truth, which is that I can’t cook (or draw, for that matter) while being watched, and don’t even think of telling me I’m doing something the wrong way, you won’t be invited back.
Once my baby and I were past the vegetable purée stage and onto real food, my mother-in-law got it into her head that I was not feeding my child any vegetables. They were quite plain to see on the table, but they weren’t soup.
Thus began the next ten years of a bucket of soup being delivered to our house every week. Ten years of a ten-litre pan of soup appearing at the door every Sunday night. Ten years of the baby, and the baby’s father, maybe eating a bowl of that soup on the first day. Ten years of soup getting fizzy in the fridge, taking up the whole bottom shelf, before the following Sunday being poured away before the next ten litres arrived.
However much I protested, however much I pleaded for it to stop, it fell on deaf ears, so sure was she that I was killing my children. The soup deliveries only stopped when we moved five kilometres away, ten years later.
It is possible to meet a Portuguese person who thinks bacalhau is disgusting, or that sardines are over-rated, or that 36 eggs in a cake is overkill, but I have never met a Portuguese soul who doesn’t adore soup. Not one.
Everybody was brought up to eat soup every day, no question, no refusing, just “eat your SOUP!” Soup is a vegetable. Soup is your five-a-day, except on days when it’s canja (chicken stock) but that still counts as having eaten soup so you won’t die.
Soup is fantastically important in the Portuguese food canon because, for all the millennia, it was predominantly what there was to eat. I’m not dismissing this. I know why the Portuguese love soup so bloody much. It means life.
But I don’t adore soup. I mean, it’s ok. In moderation. Once in a while. But every day? Shoot me.
I get half way though a bowl of most kinds of soup and I’m bored, and full. Worst of all, if it’s body temperature, an intrusive thought intrudes and I think of sick, and I have to stop eating it.
There are many Portuguese soups, but the main one, the one you get nine times out of ten, is Orange Soup. Sure, it’s called many different things. Carrot soup, vegetable soup, cabbage soup, julienne soup, watercress soup, chickpea soup, spinach soup, turnip leaf soup. It should be called Anything-Really soup, which is Anything-Really floating in a thin purée of carrot-pumpkin-leek-sometimes-potato. These are the soups that were delivered to my house once a week for ten years, so you’ll understand my aversion to it.
All the other soups are not every day soups in the modern age. They are occasional soups.
Here are some of them.
Sopa Alentejana - hot water poured over bread, with chopped garlic and coriander, with a poached egg.
My father tells of Mrs H who “did” for my grandmother, in the 1950s. That is she was her daily, her cleaner. Mrs H had two sons, a little younger than my dad. I would tell you their names, but honestly they sound like I made them up for comic reasons, so let’s call them Bill and Ted. Bill was Mrs. H’s favourite son, and she would feed him milk sop, hot milk poured over bread. Ted would get kettle broth, that is hot water poured over bread. Ted did not thrive. Bill was fine.
Extrapolating wildly from this story, my dad and I reckon that the term milksop (and, equally, milquetoast), which since medieval times has meant a feeble man, comes not from the fact that milk sop is a pale imitation of a proper meal, forming weak men, but that since it was, instead, a meal given to the favoured child, it originated as a term for a man who has been pampered and pandered to all his life by his mother, never heard the word no, and ate all the sweet sweet milk sop, and as a result is an insufferable, feeble-minded coward, once you get past the outer crust.
We all know plenty of those.
This just to say that Sopa Alentejana is the same as Kettle Broth, except it tastes of garlic and coriander. Soggy bread and I are not friends, though (see also açorda). Just give me the hot garlic and coriander water, please.
I must stop digressing, or we’ll never get through this.
Canja - chicken broth. Not a vegetable in sight. Just the whole chicken, giblets and all, boiled from raw, which does not taste the same as a wonderful chicken stock made from bones, that have roasted. Sometimes, there will be a boiled chicken foot in it your canja to nibble on. With a handful of rice or tiny pevide2 pasta in it, and a boiled egg yolk. Just like chicken soup the world over, it is given to invalids or those feeling sorry for themselves. I think it’s one of those things you need to be born eating, like Marmite, to truly enjoy.
Tomato soup - just lots of tomatoes cooked slowly with garlic, onion, olive oil and salt and puréed. Add a poached egg and some bread at the end. I poach my eggs separately in water and then drop them into the bowl of soup, because sometimes the acidic soup can disintegrate your eggs and it becomes egg and tomato soup.
Sopa de Pedra - The Arch-Duchess of soups, the once in a blue moon soup. The story of Sopa de Pedra, Stone Soup, is a tale told all over Europe. I grew up knowing it as Nail Soup. When I first heard of Stone Soup I thought it must lack something, as you wouldn’t get that nice rusty after-taste of the nail. The basic story is as follows: Somebody arrives at a village, hungry. No villager is prepared to feed him. He starts making soup from a nail and hot water as he has no money for other ingredients. The villagers are intrigued. “Oh, nail soup?” says the stranger “it’s da bomb, the most delicious soup of all… but you know what would make it even better? A soupçon of carrot!” so the villager, intrigued, and a bit thick for not seeing the grift, goes off and finds a carrot. The next villager comes by, intrigued and thick, and offers some onion, and so on and so on until the soup is a fully fledged potage, the nail can be discarded and everyone can laugh about it as the whole village eats. Sopa de Pedra is made of kidney beans and potatoes and onions and garlic and 18kg of meat and cured sausage bits and its national home is Almeirim, which is near Santarém. There you can eat the best Sopa de Pedra, and the worst imaginable Sopa de Pedra. If you’re lucky, you’ll be fed one that has been slow cooked and finished with farinheira which thickens it up into an unctuous stew. If you’re not, you’ll get a hideous bowl of quickly boiled gristle.
Bean and cabbage soup is like Sopa de Pedra without the 18kg of meat. Sometimes called Chocolate Soup to encourage small, incurious children to eat it.
Caldo Verde - Shredded collard greens in potato broth. Because it got famous in the last few years, just like the pastel de bloody nata, many people have come to believe that it is the national dish, a staple eaten every day. Madness. It’s bloody great, though. See my previous post about it.
Sopa de Peixe - tomato broth with fish and onions and pasta and it’s not sounding great but honestly, it’s perfection. Sometimes there is sopa da caldeirada, which is the end of the caldeirada, once the big bits have gone, and that’s almost my favourite bit of the caldeira.
In the non-Portuguese soup camp, I very much like cock-a-leekie, clam chowder, cullen skink, chicken noodle, un-liquidised leek and potato, mulligatawny, tom yam and the phlegmy hot and sour soup you get in Chinese restaurants that is the closest thing to actual acidy puke I can think of and, considering my aversion to vomit-like things, it is strange that I like it. But they’re all still soup, and I can only eat them once in a while.
If I live to be a hundred and twenty, I’ll never be truly Portuguese because of this.
If you want to read an actual love letter to soup, do read Liza Debevec’s piece. She’s an actual human with a soul, unlike this anti-soup freak.
Luckily, I don’t need to go on such a date because I already found my fellow armchair loving freak who is sitting on the other side of this little table in the marquise in his pants, writing something.
Pevide are pumpkin or melon seeds. The pasta is shaped like small seeds.
What the hell are you saying woman?! 😅 Soup is one of the best things there is. I eat soup everyday, at every meal and most times also at breakfast.
I'm the Portuguese who doesn't like soup. I stopped the moment I left my parents house... Maybe once it twice a year 😄