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Hungarian actor in the mood for soup

Fowl soup, Újházy style

Once upon a time, a great Hungarian actor in the 19th century had a yen for making soup–his own Hungarian version of the French poule au pot. To ensure a concentrated flavor, Újházy Ede used a rooster, then added vegetables that differed markedly in color, shape, and texture. At the end, he served the soup over delicate egg noodles to make a dish fit for King Matthias.

His friends were enchanted. Újházy was some character, as you can see in his photo. On the Budapest stage, he was Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Malvolio, Molière’s Harpagon, Beaumarchais’s Bartolo, and Gárdonyi’s Gabor. He had a growly voice. My friend Sanyi translated a description that said words would explode from his enormous mouth like smoke puffs from an engine. And that, actor to his bones, his favorite word was Marha!–a Hungarian expression for stupidity–that he would deliver with such unctuous rotundity or with such heartfelt softness that the object of it felt loved rather than insulted. Plus, of course, he loved soup.

George Lang, restauranteur extraordinaire, details in his Cuisine of Hungary a number of possible variations on the original Újházy Tyúkhúsleves: brown the carrots and onions in chicken fat to achieve a Transdanubian “yellow”; add a pinch of saffron for the same effect; ditto by dry browning unpeeled onions cut in half in a frying pan and adding to the soup. Or, start out by simmering a pound of beef in the soup water before beginning the recipe. Or add marrow bones for flavor, first salting the ends of the cut bones to keep the marrow from coming out during the cooking. Or serve on the bone…or remove and discard the bones before serving.

All well and good, but the original is quite heavenly–a rich chicken soup that is just perfect for these vile and viral winter nights. Really, are you beginning to wonder, like me, if winter is EVER going to end? A blizzard rages outside my windows today AGAIN in usually snowless Paris.

Which is why, as I promised, Gergely and I met the other weekend to shop for and make this excellent soup. But we were lazy, and Woodrow Wilson Market was being dismantled by the time we got there. And here’s where Paris is so nice. We just ambled over to Trocadero, crossed the river to the Eiffel Tower and crunched over snow down Champ de Mars to end up at Rue Cler and its market. Hungry and cold, we made the soup as fast as we could, the heck with the variations. Then washed it down with a flinty Sancerre and blotted the last drops with a crusty country bread–fantastic!

Újházy Tyúkhúsleves (Chicken Soup), for 6-8 people

1 fowl (your choice: rooster, stewing hen, or tender fryer), cut into 8 pieces
12 cups cold water
1 Tablespoon salt
1 teaspoon peppercorns
slice of ginger root
1 onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 tomato (canned is fine), peeled, seeded, and chopped
3 small carrots, peeled
2 young parsnips, peeled
1 whole celery root, peeled and cut into cubes
1/2 head cauliflower, broken into flowerets
1/2 cup peas (frozen are fine)
1/2 pound mushrooms, sliced
1 green Hungarian pepper (long, thin, and spicy), chopped
parsley, for garnish
soup noodles (which are served separately)

Put the fowl in a large soup pot with the cold water, salt, and the peppercorns and ginger tied into a cheesecloth bag. Slowly bring to a simmer, removing scum as it forms. Keep at a simmer, adding the onion, garlic, and tomato, and cook for an hour (or 2 hours, if you are using a stewing hen or rooster). Keeping the heat at a simmer, add the carrots, parsnips, celery root, cauliflower, and peas and cook for an hour or more, until the vegetables are tender. Just before you are ready to serve the soup, discard the cheesecloth bag of pepper and ginger; add the sliced mushrooms and green pepper and cook 15 minutes. You may keep the chicken/rooster pieces whole in the soup–or you may fish them out, removing the meat and putting it back in the soup, then discarding the bones and skin.

While the mushrooms and green pepper are cooking, cook the soup noodles (as many as you like) separately in plenty of salted water. When done, drain, return to the pan, stir in a little butter, and keep hot until they are served. Traditionally, they are served separate from the soup.

Bring the noodles and the soup (sprinkled with minced parsley) to the table in separate dishes. Spoon the noodles into individual bowls, then ladle the soup over top.

For another variation and for recipes of Hungarian soups and other dishes, I highly recommend you visit http://www.cookbook.hu/index_angol.htm#Soups, the Hungarian recipe site (in English) of dear friend Sanyi Fenyvesi, father of my soup partner Gergely.

Le Pain de la Bourse

A day away from the national strike, Dominique strikes a pose in front of the Bourse

Yes, it LOOKS like there’s “Pain in the Bourse” in Paris, and today’s national strike to draw attention to France’s part of worldwide international fiscal misery would support that, but in fact Le Pain de la Bourse is a darling little cafe just across the street, as you can see, from the Bourse–and its name means “The Bread of the Bourse” (and not the kind of “bread” that means money).

Do you love it? The heart of French financial markets is located in the Palais Brongniart, neoclassically built in the over-the-top 19th century by Emperor Napoleon’s architect Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart. Why did Napoleon commission Brongniart to build it? Because he loved how Brongniart had designed the layout for Père Lachaise Cemetery, now, of course, the revered home of (sigh) Jim Morrison of the Doors and zillions of other really more interesting people. Not that Jim isn’t interesting.

So Dominique (pictured) and I arranged to meet to discuss the state of things. Obama’s first days as President–she’d gone to the inauguration party at Hôtel de Ville, with lots of noise, interminable lines to get drinks, but high joy from beginning to end; I’d stayed home and watched first French TF1 then CNN with champagne and a friend. Then an embassy bookclub trip she is arranging to Orleans to follow in the footsteps of Joan of Arc, after reading Mark Twain’s fictionalized biography on same that he (wrongly) described as his “greatest work.” An Opera Comique performance that we couldn’t get tickets to. The upcoming national strike that would shut down metro, regional and neighborhood trains and flights across the country today. “Let’s try Le Pain de la Bourse,” she said. And so we did.

It was such a cute little place. Menu of the day on the chalkboard. 11,80 euros ($17) for soupe de potiron (pumpkin soup), open-face sandwiches of ham and gouda cheese on Poilâne-style bread, and salad.

We agreed the soup was terrific, but not for the reasons you’d suppose. It was so pure and simple…so French. Pumpkin cooked in seasoned water with a little mince of parsley, then pureed. That’s it. It’s not meant to bowl you over; not meant to challenge your palate with different flavors and textures and colors; not meant to fill you up. Soup in France, for the most part, is, in the words of Auguste Escoffier (that early 20th century “king of chefs and chef of kings”) designed to “put the heart at ease, calm down the violence of hunger, eliminate the tension of the day, and awaken and refine the appetite”

And it did. Markets are failing. Davos is dour. Strikes are pending. But Dominique and I sat in the shadow of the French Bourse (Per Bloomberg, “France’s CAC 40 retreated 2.2 percent” that day) and felt as if our hearts were at ease, the violence of hunger had been calmed, the tension of the day just evaporated, and our appetites were awakened and refined–which was too bad, when you look at the rest of the plate with its little cheese tartine, its little ham tartine, and a big mass of mesclun salad, not very well dressed. Oh well.

All things considered, it was a very enjoyable lunch indeed and we recommend the restaurant for its breakfast, brunch, and lunch:
Le Pain de la Bourse
33, rue Vivienne
75002 Paris
telephone: 01.42.36.76.02

And if you’re hankering after true French housewife pumpkin soup, please take a look at the original recipe of my marvelous Touraine professor of many years ago, Mme. Marie-Josie Diacre, at Soupsong’s Soupe au potiron. I cannot help be reminded, during this perilous fiscal time, that Jack Sprat also turned to pumpkins in times of trouble.

Le bar à soupes

What's on the menu today?

Friend Elizabeth found the reference on the first page of this week’s Figaro Scope, which tells you what’s hot hot hot in Paris for the coming week. And right on the first page, first item for restaurants, was Le Bar à soupes. Courez-y!, it said: “Run there!” So Christine and I did the very next day for lunch–jumping on metro line 1 and off at Bastille, closing our eyes to resist the temptations of the fabulous January sales on Faubourg St. Antoine, then hooking a left on Rue de Charonne in the 11th.

Whew, we were just about the first customers, and it was a good thing since the tiny place filled up to bursting in the next quarter hour. Who knew this was a Paris institution?

Anne-Catherine Bley (pictured) opened it 9 years ago with a single concept and hasn’t changed it one bit since then: Six freshly made, homemade soups every day but Sundays and holidays, 12 noon to 3, then 6:30 to 11pm. For 5 euros, you can sit down (or take out) a big bowl of soup, a fabulous seedy roll, and a sparkling carafe of water spiced with fresh lime. OR, for 9,90 euros you can settle down with the “formule.” This last means 1) a big bowl of soup with bread; 2) a choice of really delectable cheese, salad, or dessert; and 3) a glass of wine or coffee or tea. Carafe d’eau, of course, if you ask for it–it’s required by law for all French restaurants.

I got the pois chiche à l’orientale–a nice chunky little soup with chickpeas, tomatoes, a little pepper, and the surprise of plumped sultanas; Christine settled on the crème de carottes . We chose; we took a window seat; we were served; and we had the best time soaking it all in. Attractive and slim Anne-Catherine bustling over her soups like a mother hen (haven’t I always told you that the more soup you eat, the slenderer you’ll be?). Young, enthusiastic serveurs. Attractive setting with down lights; charcoal granite floor; blond, stainless, and glass counter crowned with dramatic flowers and revealing the soups of the day like an artist’s palette; and large oil portraits on white walls of a big fat turnip, a fennel, a tomato, and a beet. In the back room, racks of newspapers and magazines stood by to charm and stimulate the clientele. Because this wasn’t a snooty, stylish crowd at all. This was tweedy professors, and students in jeans and back packs, and young arty professionals with laptops. Possibly the 21st century de Beauvoir was in the back room arguing and slurping and writing.

The soups are very nice and very French and very much in season. This week, lots of creamy vegetable soups–carrot; red pepper; mushroom; broccoli; pumpkin; chestnuts; peas–sometimes spiced with a little mint or citrus, sometimes smooshed with the housewife’s favorite soup cheese, La vache qui rit. Lentil soups. Some surprises of borshch or celery with blue cheese.

Do I recommend this place? You know I do. Anne-Catherine delivers the goods: she says, Car une soupe c’est bon, c’est simple et c’est surtout pas triste ! , or “Because a soup is good, is simple, and above all never sad.”

Courez-y!
Le Bar à soupes
33 rue de Charonne
75011 Paris
01.43.57.53.79
www.lebarasoupes.com

The music is nice, but where's the soup?

Mmmm, fragrant with mint

My last day in Turkey, *sob*, and it’s off to the neighborhood resto for an Ottoman feast — the splendid Altinsis. We’re welcomed sequentially by some 8 smiling men into a large golden room, spangled with beams from the setting sun through its panoramic windows. The gal in charge of the children’s playroom is a little wide-eyed when she spots the Solley 4 trooping in her door, and we are immediately marched off to the table assigned to parents, where we can monitor kid shenanigans through the glass wall separating us. We kick back with a sigh and study the menu. It’s formidible and told in pictures–some 93 of them.

We can’t resist the stuffed grapeleaves, the pide, the kebaps, and a bunch of tasty meze–but take a look at the incredible pictured Eksili Ufak Köfte soup. It’s a fragrant and spicy broth thick with bits of tender lamb and tomatoes. But how about those exquisite and rich dumplings filling the bowl–and how about the fact that they’re punctuated by a large dark splash of heady mint oil? Quite spectacular in appearance and what an exciting combination of flavors. We’d love a recipe!

We felt as pampered as the women in Altinsis’ pictured artwork, and we highly recommend the soup and the restaurant:
ALTINSIS
Turan Günes Bulvari 19.Cadde 1/B MSB Lojmanlari karsisi
Oran Sehri - ANKARA
Tel: 0312 492 07 07

Fatos in the kitchen

lentil soup in snowy Ankara

You know you’re in Nanna heaven when you wake up on Christmas eve morning in central Turkey and find your world suddenly covered in a thick blanket of snow…with grandchildren pulling off your wool one and telling you to get your *** out of bed, downstairs, and outside to build a snowman.

Oh, you don’t think that’s enough to qualify for heaven? How about coming back into the house, hands stinging with cold, to find Fatos in the kitchen making a big pot of mercimek çorbas?

Fatos rushes up to me, brandishing a 12-inch chef knife and a can of tomatoes. Before I have time to get scared, I figure out she’s telling me that she usually opens cans with a knife, but it’s just not working on this American can. I rummage around and find the can opener. Then stick around to watch her bring the tomatoes to boil with water in a kettle, add handfuls of red Turkish lentils, masses of salt, spicy red pepper, and garlic. That’s it. In another pot, she boils up bulgur with brown lentils and lots of salt. Thirty minutes later, we’re all at the table. The soup is simple but great–and when we get close to the bottom of our bowls, she shows us we should spoon in the thick bulgur to absorb the last bits of soup and eat until we feel like we are bursting. Everyday lunch in Turkey. Why not try Ezo Gelin corbasi, a traditional wedding lentil-bulgur soup complete with tragic story, for the best of both worlds?

There’s more to Turkish soups than lentils, though. My Paris neighbor David Berry, in fact, claims that Turkish soups are the best in the world, and he tells endless stories of fabulous meals in odd places that all boil down to a Turkish chef in the kitchen.

Here’s another one to support his claim: Christmas shopping at the lush Panora mall in Oran, Angi, the 4 kids, and I stop for a snack at the food court. Not your usual pizza/taco/wok n’ roll/chick fil-A kind of a place. Almost all Turkish specialties…and each shop has its own homemade soup. Decisions, decisions. We stop at FISHO and my bowl of balik corbasi is so yummy, so creamy, so nicely spiced, and so packed with tender white fish, that I just had to track it down for you:

BALIK ÇORBASI, for 6 people

2-pound red gurnard or other tasty whole fish
1 onion, peeled and sliced
12 black peppercorns
1 dried chili pepper
3 sprigs parsley
2 cups celeriac root, peeled and cut into small cubes
2 cups potato, peeled and cut into small cubes
2 carrots, peeled and cut into small cubes
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, peeled and cubed
6 Tablespoons minced parsley
2 egg yolks
1/2 cup lemon juice
Black pepper, salt, turkish red pepper (pul biber)

In a large saucepan, put the fish, onions, black pepper, red chile, and parsley sprigs in 12 cups of cold water, bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer, covered, for 30 minutes. Strain, ideally through cheesecloth layers, into another saucepan, letting the fish cool in the strainer. Bring the strained stock to a boil then add cubed carrot, celeriac, potato, onion, and garlic. Reduce heat to medium and boil the vegetables until soft, about 45 or more minutes. Peel the skin off the fish and remove all the bones, then scrape large chunks of pure fish into the soup and also the minced parsley. Season to taste with salt, pepper, and red pepper. Beat the egg yolks and lemon juice together, then add a cup of the hot broth to it, beating constantly; pour into the soup and let it thicken. Ladle into bowls and top with a lemon slice, minced parsley, and a sprinkling of hot pepper.

And did I mention the sweet spice of people strolling by and stopping to hug the grandkids and offer them treats? How about the guy who took a fancy to 18-month-old Cort and carried him off to buy him a race car at the local toy store? Just to be nice. Surely there’s no place on earth with a more generous and child-friendly people.

All the makings of a great borshch

Enough to send you off carolling

Way back in 1997, not long after I’d launched soupsong.com, Sándor Fenyvesi–air traffic controller at Budapest approach–contacted me over my website with this great recipe for borscht, which he’d acquired under the communist regime when he was sent as an 18-year-old Hungarian boy to a special school in Latvia. Thus began a great friendship between my family and his. We freely exchanged recipes between our websites, exchanged life stories and points of view, and met for the first time in Budapest in 2000 when I was in town measuring the Hungarian Police Museum for an exhibit the FBI was about to mount there.

What is it about soup lovers? Every contact I’ve made over my website has turned into a love feast. Sanyi and Kati welcomed me into their home, introduced me to their 3 young boys, and fed me Hungarian delicacies–a truly exquisite day.

Yet who could have predicted that 8 years later their eldest son Gergely would end up in Paris, a bright and raging capitalist at Société Générale? That’s him in the picture. He’s come to dinner when my family has been in town. He’s taken care of my cat Min and my apartment when I was in Amman. Now we are occasional and enthusiastic partners in soupmaking.

It was freezing when he arrived on Saturday morning with a fine bottle of Château Les Ancres 2005, a Grand Vin de Bordeaux, in hand. We stashed it in the kitchen, picked up the market bag, read over his Dad’s recipe, and headed to the fabulous open air food market on av. Woodrow Wilson, bottom of the 16th Arr. You see the results in front of him–gorgeous beef bourguignon with some bone thrown in; slab of bacon; veggies freshly pulled from the ground; herbs; seedy pumpernickel bread; crème fraîche d’Isigny. He’d also brought an ace up his sleeve–a special borscht flavor pack from his Ukrainian friend Marika.

Let me tell you, this was a day’s work, thanks to making the beef stock from scratch–and we loved it that way: time to do some Christmas shopping, time to watch Claude Chabrol’s “This Man Must Die”, even time to open that great wine as we were getting close, “just for a sip.” Then the payoff, which you can see with your own eyes. Absolutely heavenly layers of flavors and textures and colors.

Doesn’t it put you in the Christmas spirit for this eminently Christmas soup from the Ukraine and Russia? Gergely and I highly recommend that you dust off that soup kettle and get to work. You’ll find Sanyi’s recipe at Soupsong’s Ukrainian Borscht.

And stay tuned for future adventures into soupmaking with my Hungarian connection. “Are you telling me,” said Gergely in astonishment, “that you don’t know Újházy Tyúkhúsleves?” Sounds like a January project to me….

Yes, I'm a fan of urbanspoon.com

Plus I make great soup

Back in September, when I was hyperventilating over the beauty of my just one-year-old granddaughter Rosalind in Seattle, I got taken out to lunch by the urbanspoon.com guys, where daughter Meg had been working part time. Don’t know about urbanspoon.com? You should. Among other amazing things that it does, it lets you use the GPS on your ipod to locate the closest, say, SOUP restaurant to your own two feet at that moment, then draws you a map to get there and lets you read reviews about it before you walk through the door. I tried it out on Patrick’s ipod–incredible and incredibly easy. Plus I got the t-shirt. “Take it to Paris,” Adam said, “we’d love to urbanspoon that city too.”

So when Ana suggested we Pudlo on Friday night, I finally remembered to pop the t-shirt in my bag for a trial spin.

Pudlo?

That’s the brilliant Gilles Pudlowski’s restaurant guide of Paris. Ana and I go Pudloing the way Oscar Wilde’s Algy Moncrieff goes Bunburying.

La Gorille Blanc is a Pudlo “Special Favorite.” It’s in the 7th Arrondissement on the Left Bank, within spitting distance of the great Bon Marche department store and food emporium. Bernard Arény has made a truly sweet spot of it, bringing in a great chef with a fabulous menu, and consecrating the place to Flocon de neige (Snowflake), the astonishing albino gorilla who was captured in equitorial Guinea by the Fang tribe in 1966 and thence transported to the Barcelona zoo. Snowflake lived to the great age of 40 and fathered some 21 babies, none of them albinos. When Arény visited him in Barcelona, it was love at first sight.

The restaurant is tiny, charged with a warm, rich, and silvergleaming atmosphere, and hung with portraits of Snowflake. Ana and I are the first people in the place (typical Americans–”only” 7:30 pm) and it’s a good thing, cause we cheerfully go about making asses out of ourselves. “Ha ha ha,” says Ana, “My friend is going to write up this evening’s meal on the Internet, is it okay to use the camera?” “Ha ha ha, oh yes, that’s fine,” says the darling waitress. M. Arény is in the background, very chic in his brick red shirt and black trousers. Ana takes a picture of me tucking the Urbanspoon t-shirt under my jacket and posing next to a picture of Snowflake climbing a ladder. Nope, can’t see the logo. How about putting the t-shirt logo on top of the photo? Non, non, non! M. Areny rushes up with a different and great photo of Snowflake’s head and takes over the stage managing of the whole shot, pictured. We love it and hope you do too. And we’re all relieved that we got THAT out of the way.

Now we’ve ordered. We’re embarked on a lovely pichet of St. Emilion Bordeaux. And oh la la, the soup arrives and it’s gorgeous! Un velouté de chataignes en cappuccino aux cèpes séchés, or creamy chestnut soup with a porcini mushroom emulsion, splashed with paprika and topped with chervil. Oh my. Ana and I both want to dive in head first, but the staff springs into photography support. I take a picture with the flash and it doesn’t do the dish justice. Candlesticks appear from all directions and we end up with the photo you see. It DOES do the look of the soup justice, but not the taste and feel. The soup is light, rich, and sweet but goes into palate overdrive when paired with the musky froth of deeply flavored mushrooms. Something to suck through your teeth and savor in small swallows, if only you had that kind of self control.

And the rest of the dinner follows suit, Ana so happy with la terrine de champignon à la crème d’ail (mushroom terrine) and both of us with le fricassé de lapin et oignons aux raisins secs (stewed rabbit), not to mention the superb desserts–price for each of us, including wine and tip, 45 euros. Not bad!

We highly recommend it: LA GORILLE BLANC
11 bis, rue Chomel
75007 Paris
01.45.49.04.54

I’ll work on developing a recipe for this marvelous chestnut soup, but in the meantime, if you simply must have chestnut soup today, try the much heartier Hungarian recipe for Creamy Chestnut and Smoked Ham Soup on my website.

A toast to quick healing

French chicken soup will drink to that

My Dad took an awful fall this past Friday night and split his hip bone in half.  Not something a former B-29 pilot likes to admit, even if he is an octogenarian+ with the weakest pins a man could ever be cursed with.  The good news is that it happened in Durham, NC, and he’s in the great Duke hospital for care–now titanium/ceramic man, convalescing with a hip replacement.  The bad news is that it happened in Durham, NC, and I’m here in Paris, France, feeling like a complete dumbbell of a daughter.

When in doubt, make soup.  In this case, I made a completely magnificent chicken stock last night and got in tonight from work to skim off the congealed fat and find it pure, strong, and heady.  Add pressed garlic, soup noodles, salt, and white pepper.  Toss in chopped greens at the end and top with parsley.  It’s called Savoyarde soupe de fides and is a soup famous for curing farmers in the snowy French Alps of what ails them.  You DO know about chicken soup curing what ails you, right? So why not use it to hasten the cure of a hip replacement?  That’s what I’m thinking.

There it is pictured, can’t you just smell the fragrance and imagine biting into those slices of pavé châtaigne pain (chestnut bread) slathered in AOC butter…sipping that glass of flinty Sancerre?

Open your mouth wide, Dad.  I’m about to email you some big spoonsful of Soupe de Fides. I think I can already hear the sweet sounds of it knitting your bones back together.

Soupe de Fides (for 2)

3 cups rich chicken stock
1 garlic clove, pressed
1/2 cup broken-up fine soup noodles
1/4 cup chopped fresh greens and herbs
salt and white pepper to taste
sprigs of parsley to garnish

Bring the stock to a boil over medium-high heat with the garlic and cook for a minute.  Add noodles and cook, uncovered, until they’re just done, from 3-5 minutes.  Add the greens/herbs just as you take the pan off the fire.  Stir, season with salt and pepper, ladle into two bowls, and top with sprigs of parsley.

Bon appetit…and get better, Dad.