Soups are a very important feature of dinners in my home. A traditional Chinese meal has rice, three dishes and one soup. No one follows this tradition any more except my mum, save for the odd day or two of the week when she does a one-dish meal and then gets a bit defensive and apologetic about it. Often the one-dish meal will still involve soup.

Once you have a good homemade stock (see here) in the fridge, it is never difficult to make a meal – add some noodles, fresh vegetables, and poach an egg or some seasoned meat in the broth and you have food that’s fresh and delicious in less time than it would take to pop out for Itsu takeaway.

I like to have soup any time of the year. In the cold winter months, when there’s frosty rain falling from grey skies and grey sludge covering the ground (you don’t really get white snow in London), there is nothing better than curling up indoors with a bowl of soup. I warm my cold hands by hugging the bowl, then I inhale the fragrant steam and let it tickle my frozen nose before I dig into the broth, feeling it warm me up from the inside too. On these miserable days, I tend to go for a richer soup, such as duck simmered with preserved vegetables (see giam chye ark, here) or a spicy aromatic one (see soto ayam, here).

In sunnier months, when I crave food that’s light and virtuous for my spring detox/summer beach body resolutions, a cleansing broth also makes the perfect meal. On such days, I like to gently poach greens in stock, letting the vegetables flavour the broth (see chicken tinola, here). I let the soup cool a little before I slurp it down with smug self-satisfaction.

The soups in this chapter are most often accompanied by rice, unless otherwise stated. As the soups often have some kind of protein and/or vegetables in them, together they make a substantial meal. You can also be rebellious and add noodles to the broths, though more noodle soups can be found in the Noodles chapter (here).