My sincere thanks go to fellow members of Les Dames d’Escoffier Philadelphia Chapter who helped shop, prep, cook, and do the inevitable clean-up for our photo shoots. They include Adrienne Abramson, The Artful Chef, and Angie Brown, Soul Catering. I relied on Linda Gellman to help coordinate, prep, and critique the soups at each session. As a long-time catering production chef, Linda’s excellent organization skills, unflagging encouragement, and salty sense of humor, helped make our photo shoots as much fun as they were productive. These three, as well as my dear friend and soup lover, Gail Morrison, lent me treasured soup bowls, ladles, and tureens from their personal collections that appear in many of the beautiful photos in this book.
I’d like to thank Ronit and Shuli Madrone, two Israeli-born spicemongers who carry an excellent selection of freshly ground small-batch, hand-selected and blended spices for their company, Whole Spice (www.wholespice.com). I used their Mediterranean dried spearmint, Turkish Urfa pepper, Syrian Aleppo pepper, Indian asafetida, Sri Lankan true cinnamon, Indian curry leaves, Mexican guajillo chiles, and Sichuan peppercorns, to name just a few. Their fragrant and boldly-flavored spices gave authentic flavor to these soups. If you’re ever in Napa, California, stop in to their small, well-stocked spice stand at the Oxbow Market. They are especially knowledgeable about hard-to-find Turkish, Middle Eastern, and North African spices.
Once again, the Giovannucci family, owners of Philadelphia’s historic and beloved culinary emporium, Fante’s, (www.fantes.com), provided me with top-quality soupmaking tools, pots and pans, and cutlery—the kind that you buy once in your life because they are so well made that they last for years and years. I particularly prize my Oxo food mill—all stainless steel with three removable plates—to make straining puréed soups a breeze.
My special thanks to Clare Pelino, of ProLiterary Agency, for connecting me and Quarry Books—quite a successful match as this is my fourth book with the company. I want to call out Tiffany Hill, my editor, who has been warm, encouraging, and always there to help me make this the best possible book. Also, project manager Betsy Gammons, who kept me in line so everything was done in a timely fashion, and art director David Martinell, who oversaw the design of this beautiful, highly informative book that is so easy for the reader to use. Copyeditor Kathy Dragolich has an enviable eye for detail ensuring that every recipe is correct. She’s also a whiz at doing metric conversions, which allowed me more time to test the recipes and concentrate on writing.
We all ate a lot of soups this summer, including my neighbors at our annual block party to which I brought four pots of soup—all empty when I took them home. (Their favorites were the Rumanian Beet-Vegetable Borscht and the Scallop and White Corn Chowder.) With the Soupmaker’s Kitchen, I hope that enthusiastic home cooks, chefs, and culinarians will be inspired to make their own stocks and deliciously seasonal soups from places as far flung as Vietnam, Rumania, Mexico, Italy, Alaska, Portugal, New Orleans, Turkey, Greece, Senegal, and Hungary in their own kitchens. Nothing is more welcoming than a big pot of soup simmering on the stove. Soup’s on!