Growing up and watching my mom cook every meal from scratch taught me two practical kitchen lessons that I want to share with you: plan ahead and use what you have on hand. I knew without a doubt that pot roast dinners at our family table would be followed the next day with vegetable beef soup. You can apply these same principles to your meal preparation. If you have broccoli florets left from a weekend snack tray, make Cream of Broccoli Soup, which you can pair with a side of smoked ham for tonight. Use the leftover ham for Navy Beans and Ham, which can be made ahead of time, giving you an easy nutritious meal tomorrow. Give your dinner leftovers a good look before stacking them in the back of the fridge. Ask yourself how you can reuse or reinvent these items.
As you peruse these recipes, you will notice a common thread weaving through the collection. Each soup contains herbs or spices—natural seasonings that enhance the taste of ordinary ingredients. These distinctive flavorings, like soup itself, intertwine all cultures, without regard to borders.
Emma Ewing, a woman ahead of her time, wrote the first known American pamphlet dedicated to soups, called Soup and Soup Making, which was published in Chicago in 1882. Believing that soup was “convenient, economic and healthful,” she lauded the qualities that we have come to expect from food in modern life. “Soup” she said, “must not be a weak, sloppy, characterless compound.” And holding the same high standards for soup over a hundred years ago that we do now, she added that it “must be skillfully prepared, so as to please the eye and gratify the palate.”