Exaltation of Soups
Author: Patricia Solley
Throughout history and around the world, soup has been used to bring comfort, warmth, and good health. A bowl of soup can symbolize so much—celebrations, major life passages, and the everyday. Inspired by Patricia Solley's website, SoupSong.com, and organized according to function—soups to heal the sick, recover from childbirth, soothe a hangover, entice the object of your affection, and mark special occasions and holidays—An Exaltation of Soups showcases more than a hundred of the best soup recipes of all time, including:
• Festive Wedding Soup with Meatballs from Italy
• Egyptian Fava Bean Soup, made to give strength to convalescents
• Creamy Fennel Soup with Shallots and Orange Spice from Catalonia—perfect for wooing a lover
• Hungarian "Night Owl" Soup, designed to chase a hangover
• Spicy Pumpkin and Split Pea Soup from Morocco, served to celebrate Rosh Hashanah
• Tanzanian Creamy Coconut-Banana Soup for Kwanzaa
Spiced with soup riddles, soup proverbs, soup poetry, and informative sidebars about the lore and legends of soup through the ages, An Exaltation of Soups is a steaming bowl of goodness that is sure to satisfy.
Publishers Weekly
Solley's passionate compendium of history, folklore, literary references and recipes collects tidbits about and recipes for soup from all over the world. The author, who runs the SoupSong.com Web site, shares proverbs and quotes about soup's famed comforting qualities, and recipes for stocks, which are the foundation of all soups. She looks at the role soups can play in life's key moments: e.g., French "Boiled Water" Garlic Soup is traditionally served to convalescing new mothers; Guatemalan Lamb Soup with Tamales, with its robust, meaty content, is reserved for weddings and other fancy occasions; and Irish Cottage Broth for the Wake is "enough to bring the dead back to life." Next come "soups of purpose," that is, ones that supposedly assist in weight loss (Cabbage Soup), appetite stimulation (Creamy Crab and Cognac Soup) and healing (Fava Bean Soup from Egypt). There are also recipes to foster love (Lobster Sweetheart Soup) or cure a hangover (Beer Soup from Denmark). The clear and generally simple recipes are enhanced by informative and descriptive head notes; sidebars on such topics as the use of almonds as an aphrodisiac or the history of Japanese soy sauce; literary quotations and extracts; and personal stories. (Dec.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
In 1997, Solley launched SoupSong.com, a web site devoted to all things soup, and produces a monthly newsletter about soup. Now, in this well-researched, enjoyable book, she shares soup traditions, lore, new recipes, and contributions from other soup enthusiasts. While many cookbooks are organized by main ingredient, culture of origin, or season (e.g., Rick Curry's The Secrets of Jesuit Soupmaking), Solley first relates the origins of soup and whets our appetites with proverbs, quotes, and recipes for bases. Then the recipes are organized by function: soups to recover from childbirth, celebrate marriage, honor the dead, stimulate appetite, strengthen a convalescent, woo a lover, and chase a hangover. Finally, there are "Soups of Piety and Ritual," including recipes for Christian, Jewish, and Islamic festivals. Recipes are accompanied by quotes, poems, riddles, and sidebars-sometimes about soup but just as likely to be about an ingredient or ritual. More than just a practical book for cooks, this surprising book is fun for foodies and highly recommended for all public libraries.-Bonnie Poquette, Milwaukee, WI Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Book review: The Principles of Running or Im Not in the Mood
Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America
Author: Fredrick Douglass Opi
Frederick Opie's culinary history is an insightful portrait of the social and religious relationship between people of African descent and their cuisine. Beginning with the Atlantic slave trade and concluding with the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Opie composes a global history of African American foodways and the concept of soul itself, revealing soul food to be an amalgamation of West and Central African social and cultural influences as well as the adaptations blacks made to the conditions of slavery and freedom in the Americas.
Soul is the style of rural folk culture, embodying the essence of suffering, endurance, and survival. Soul food comprises dishes made from simple, inexpensive ingredients that remind black folk of their rural roots. Sampling from travel accounts, periodicals, government reports on food and diet, and interviews with more than thirty people born before 1945, Opie reconstructs an interrelated history of Moorish influence on the Iberian Peninsula, the African slave trade, slavery in the Americas, the emergence of Jim Crow, the Great migration, the Great Depression, and the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. His grassroots approach reveals the global origins of soul food, the forces that shaped its development, and the distinctive cultural collaborations that occurred among Africans, Asians, Europeans, and Americans throughout history.
Hog and Hominy traces the class- and race-inflected attitudes toward black folk's food in the African diaspora as it evolved in Brazil, the Caribbean, the American South, and such northern cities as Chicago and New York, mapping the complex cultural identity of African Americans as it developedthrough eating habits over hundreds of years.
Pauline Baughman - Library Journal
Soul food, a term popularized in the 1960s, is typically associated with African American cuisine of the Southern United States. In his first book, Opie, professor of African Diaspora studies, analyzes the rich culinary origins of soul food that are rooted in world history, including the colonization of America and the Atlantic slave trade. Numerous scholars, however, including Opie, agree that many crops indigenous to other areas were introduced to Africa prior to the Columbian Exchange in 1492 and that soul food not only has roots in the American South but is a hybridization of African, European, Asian, and Amerindian food cultures. Through interviews, archival sources, and periodicals, Opie examines the eating habits of African Americans from the 14th century to the present, showing the effects that slavery, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Nation of Islam have had on the cuisine. This scholarly account is heavily footnoted and includes an extensive bibliography. Recommended for academic libraries and libraries with strong African American or culinary collections.
Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations
1 The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Columbian Exchange 1
2 Adding to My Bread and Greens: Enslaved Cookery in British Colonial America 17
3 Hog and Hominy: Southern Foodways in the Nineteenth Century 31
4 The Great Migration: From the Black Belt to the Freedom Belt 55
5 The Beans and Greens of Necessity: African Americans and the Great Depression 83
6 Eating Jim Crow: Restaurants, Barbecue Stands, and Bars and Grills During Segregation 101
7 The Chitlin Circuit: The Origins and Meanings of Soul and Soul Food 121
8 The Declining Influence of Soul Food: The Growth of Caribbean Cuisine in Urban Areas 139
9 Food Rebels: African American Critics and Opponents of Soul Food 155
Epilogue 175
Notes 183
Bibliography 211
Index 227
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