Thin or thick, hot or cold, simple or complex, soups are loved by most people and give the home cook opportunities to be creative with ingredients that are in season and on hand. You can make soups in quantity and serve them over several days or freeze them for later use. Light soups make good first courses; more robust ones can be meals in themselves, perhaps with a salad. In this section you’ll find a wide variety of soups, some inspired by Asian cuisines, others taken from the culinary traditions of Mexico or Italy. Like other recipes in this book, all are quick and easy to make once you assemble the ingredients and do the usual slicing and chopping.

Recipes marked veg are vegetarian, those marked v are vegan, and those marked gf are gluten-free. The symbols veg*, v*, and gf* indicate recipes that can be modified to be vegetarian, vegan, or gluten-free by substituting or omitting specific ingredients.