Posts Tagged ‘Summer Soups’

Soup has been around since cooking began – in olden days when food wasn’t abundant putting lots of vegetables into a pot with water and waiting for it to cook was filling, cheap and vegetable soup could feed and nourish a family. Poor people ate these soups as their main meal whereas the more wealthy folk would eat soup to begin a meal. Delicate soups like consomme and broth debuted in Paris in the 18th century and were called ‘restoratifs’ – which later became the now globally used term for an eating place – ‘restaurant’.

In the summertime cold soups can be refreshing on a very hot day – the more robust hot, packed with potatoes, gravy and root vegetable soups being more suited to warm people up during the winter.

The most popular and well-known of cold vegetable soup is Gazpacho, originally from Andalucia, southern Spain it evolved through Moorish and Roman cuisines. Consisting of Olive oil, garlic, stale bread, vinegar, ground almonds it was called white gazpacho. Once tomatoes and peppers were imported to the New World from Spain they were added to the vegetable soup and there are a multitude of varieties today some soups made with with avocados and tropical fruits and occasionally watermelon. Read the rest of this entry »