SOUP FOR SUPPER Or lunch, or even (yes!) for breakfast
The first in what I hope will be a series of souper posts, from now through winter and well into spring.
Why soup?
Because soup usually has everything we need in the way of protein, carbohydrates, fat, vitamins and minerals
Because soup is almost always (and with notable exceptions) quick and easy to prepare, usually with ready-to-hand pantry ingredients
Because soup can be stored for days and in the freezer for weeks, offering its bounty whenever a hunger artist goes hunting for something to eat.
Spicy Tomato-Lentil Soup
It’s a late start, but winter has suddenly landed on the coast of Maine. The snow is piling up in the garden, the cold is bitter, the wind is harsh, and the forecast is for worse to come—perfect weather for this spicy soup, which was inspired by my travels in southern India some years ago. An interesting counterpoint: Spicy foods are great on a cold winter’s day but down in the equatorial tropics of Kerala, at the tip end of the subcontinent, spicy foods are also considered good to eat in the heat, the theory being that if you can ignite your insides, your outsides won’t feel the temperature so acutely. So make this soup now and tuck the recipe aside to try again in July—could it also be delicious chilled like an extra-zesty gazpacho? Maybe!
I might have called this rasam, which is the soup my family and I had almost daily throughout Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and other places we visited, but it’s not the traditional rasam that’s enjoyed all over the Subcontinent. Truly, you could call rasam (sometimes spelled rassam) the pasta al pomodoro of India. Like the Italian dish, it comes in dozens, doubtless hundreds, of permutations, varying from region to region, from town to town, even from household to household. Some cooks make it with no tomatoes, some insist that tomatoes are quintessential, some like it thick and filling while others prefer a thin and restorative broth. Long before I went to India, rasam had been recommended to me by the Indian cookbook writer Julie Sahni as a hangover cure. I wrote this story for the New York Times about post celebration cures, published on New Year’s Day in 1986, with Julie’s recipe for rasam. (I’m not allowed to republish recipes from the NYT since they are the property of my erstwhile employer, but the recipe is in the story.)
Ammini Ramachandran, another Indian food writer, says rasam is the predecessor of mulligatawny, the Anglo-Indian favorite. She prefers the thin version, a recipe for which you can find in her excellent compilation, Grains, Greens, and Grated Coconuts. It is of course vegetarian and it might also be vegan, though I’m no expert on that.
Lentils are key to the soup, and lentils, it’s well known, are a foundation ingredient in Indian cuisine, where a vast panoply of lentils in all shapes and sizes are available for the cook’s choice--urad dhal, toovar dhal, chana dhal, moon dhal, and many, many others. The small, shiny, black lentils I used in my recipe, however, sometimes called Beluga lentils because they look (so it is said) like caviar, are not traditional in India. But that’s what I had on hand and since this is a recipe for using up what you have, that’s what I used.
What is distinctively Indian about it, however, is the technique, which I learned from Kerala’s deaconess of cuisine, Nimmy Paul. In her Kochi kitchen she introduced me to the South Indian way of roasting spices in a dry skillet, then grinding them in combination to add during cooking. I use an old coffee mill to grind them though if you were being one hundred percent authentic you would grind and pound them in a mortar with a pestle. But the coffee grinder works just fine; if it has been used to grind coffee, I strongly recommend grinding a couple of croutons of dry, unflavored bread just to get rid of the coffee flavor. Wipe the mill out with paper towels and it's ready for your spice mix—and you should be free to mix and match as it pleases you. Turmeric seems to be essential, as is coriander (the dried seeds of what we now call cilantro).
For the chili, don’t worry too much about the kind of dried peppers you use. If you don’t like very hot food, I’d start with ancho chilies, but it you’re really into Hot Stuff, then go with something like small, hot cobaneros. And remember that you can reduce the heat of chilies by discarding the seeds and white inner membranes.
This recipe is not for a traditional rasam, although I would not be surprised to find something like it in almost any Indian kitchen. My adaptation, as I noted, uses ingredients I had on hand, ingredients I expect most good cooks will have as well. The one exception might be tamarind paste but that is not difficult to find in a well-stocked urban supermarket. Turmeric? Surely you have this nutritionally dynamic spice in your store cupboard. Mustard, cumin, and coriander seeds should be on every pantry shelf and if fenugreek isn’t, you can leave it out this time but be sure to order a small jar of fenugreek to keep on hand because it’s useful in many other preparations too. Burlap & Barrel is my source for high-quality spices and aromatics, including fenugreek and others.
So here’s my recipe for spicy tomato-lentil soup (I won’t call it rasam):
First mix, toast and grind the spices. To a dry skillet set over medium-low heat add:
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
1 ½ teaspoons cumin seeds
¼ teaspoon fenugreek seeds
1 tablespoon mustard seeds
Toast the seeds, stirring frequently, until the coriander and mustard seeds start to pop and their aroma begins to arise. Be very careful not to burn.
Stir in:
1 teaspoon whole black peppercorns
1 or 2 dried chilis, broken in pieces, seeds discarded
Continue roasting and stirring until the pieces of chili start to crisp up, then remove the skillet from the heat and set it aside to cool somewhat before grinding all the spices to a powder in a spice grinder or a coffee mill. Set the spice powder aside.
In a 2- o 3-quart saucepan over low heat sweat in a tablespoon of olive oil the following:
1 small onion or a plump shallot, peeled and chopped fine
3 or 4 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped fine
About 1 inch of fresh ginger, peeled and chopped fine
When these aromatics start to soften, add ½ cup of small lentils (Italian or French—or Indian if you have them), along with the juice from a 28-ounce can of San Marzano tomatoes and enough water to make about 3 cups of liquid. Stir in 1 to 2 teaspoons of turmeric and set to cook, just simmering, covered, for 20 to 25 minutes, or until the lentils have softened.
Now add the tomatoes from the can, crushing them in your hands as you add them to the pot. You should have about 2 cups of crushed tomatoes. Add another 2 cups of boiling water and a tablespoon of tamarind syrup, along with the spice mixture that you set aside. Cover the pan and cook until the tomatoes are practically dissolved, then puree, using a stick blender. You could puree the soup until it is entirely smooth or you could leave it a little chunky—that’s entirely up to your taste. And you can make the soup thick or thin depending on the amount of liquid you add.
Could you add chicken stock? Yes, of course, although it would no longer be vegetarian.
Finally, stir in a can of coconut milk, 13.6 ounces (400 ml), stirring it into the soup mix. Bring to a gentle simmer and taste for a good balance of seasoning among spicy, sweet, and tart. If the soup tastes too bland, add more tamarind or fresh lemon juice and/or more chili pepper or ginger, cooking the soup another 5 minutes to blend those flavors in. And if the soup is too fiery, add some plain whole-milk yogurt to tame the heat, in which case it will no longer be vegan.
Serve as is, or spoon over plain boiled rice, or add a dollop of plain, whole-milk or Greek yogurt on top. Whichever you choose, add a shower of chopped fresh cilantro before you send the soup to the table.
If I were reading aloud, I'd quote MFK Fisher, from _With Bold Knife and Fork_: "Soup of the evening. Beautiful, beautiful sooooop."
OH MY GOODNESS to this soup!!!
It is exactly what I hoped it would be when I read the recipe.
What should my next recipe trial be if I loved this one, Nancy?