Snatches Of Soup

"...and she makes hers with leeks. It's the best!"

Sometimes, I catch a snatch of conversation like that at a party; when I do, I have to search out the person who said it, and find out what they were talking about. This is the way I always found great recipes before the advent of food blogs.

This time, it was my pal Sari at a dinner with friends, describing her mother's butternut squash soup. She went on to tell me that her mother sautes the leeks in butter and roasts the squash in the oven before adding water to simmer until it's ready to puree. Sounded good and I already had leeks in the fridge, so the next time I was at the store I scored a butternut.

Having only the sketchiest idea of how Sari's Mom made her soup, I started with the part I knew - halve the butternut, place it face down on a baking sheet and bake it until soft and saute' the white and light green parts of three small washed leeks in a little butter. A few days ago, I read Cookiecrumb's March 11th piece about using cooking waters and, since I had some left over from simmering our St. Patrick's Day corned beef, I defatted and strained it, adding it in place of the water in the soup. The result was lightly salty and gently flavored with notes from all three - the corned beef, the roasted squash and the leeks. I thought it could be improved by adding yogurt so I tried that, three nice big tablespoons full of European style, and some cracked black pepper and a few crunchy garlic croutons for garnish and texture. Success!

Experiencing a brief return to chilly winter weather last Sunday, it was the perfect entree. My Beloved and I sat down to a steaming bowl of Snatched Soup and toasted Sari's Mom with our first spoonful.

A la Recherche du Yaourt Perdu

For my sophomore year in high school, I was dropped into a French boarding school while the rest of the family led a peripatetic life following the fleet around the Mediterranean. I felt pretty hard done by at first, but as I made friends, learned some shaky schoolgirl French and got a taste of the food (even in a boarding school, it seems the French are incapable of cooking lousy food), I settled in and started to have fun.

One of the pleasures that I learned there and that stays with me today is so simple, it hardly seems worth posting about - plain yogurt with granulated sugar.

In France, the yogurt came in charming little clear glass jars, like miniature milk bottles for those of you who remember recyclable glass bottles delivered to the back door by our childhood folk hero, the Milkman. The French students taught me to lift the little cardboard stopper and fill the small space between the top of the yogurt and the top of the jar with granulated sugar and to mix it carefully in. Regular granulated sugar is best for this, not the superfine kind.

The result is sweet and tart, smooth and crunchy all at the same time, a dairy treat that sends me back with a single taste, like M. Proust, to my youth. All at once, I am 15 again, plotting how to sneak cigarettes without being caught by the redoubtable headmistress, Mme. Blay.