soupsong.com

Bean soup by any other name would smell as sweet

Hoping for a night of decadence

Brisk Friday night in Paris with woodsmoke in the air-Karen was on time, Barbara took the bus, Pat and Ana snaked thru 3 metro transfers to get to La Ferrandaise , just a few hops from the Sorbonne on the left bank. Absinthe on our minds. We’d been fantasizing all day, recalling the collective artistic madness this so-called Green Fairy spawned in the 19th and early 20th century. I said, “I’ll order soup so I can put this on my blog.” Fine, they said, now let’s order the Absinthe. So there you have it: a picture of the soup and a picture of the elaborate Absinthe apparatus.

What about La Ferrandaise (8 rue Vaugirard, former home of controversial author Knut Hamson)? Beef specialities from the Auvergne region of France. Nice atmosphere but a cranky staff and a menu with ups and downs, not as exciting as it was when Ana and Barbara first stumbled on it and its absinthe connection last year. The absinthe turned out to be a big glass of liquid licorice, pleasant-though no green fairies actually tapped us on our shoulders. Much stranger than the absinthe was the soup, Velouté de coco, julienne de concombre acidulée (take a breath), crouton au raifort. “It’s a cold soup,” the waitress said, clearly warning me off it. “I love cold soup,” I said. “Bring it on.” And she did…but it was hot. Imagine ceremonially pouring hot and creamy white bean soup over a bouquet of icy, marinated cucumber strips at table-and topping it with a crouton strip dabbed with horseradish.

Well, you know, here we are, four women all pooped out on a Friday night after an intense work week, being rushed through our decadent glasses of absinthe. I let it pass. But when the course was cleared, I asked why that cold soup was served hot. “The manager thought you’d like it better hot,” she said. “He was wrong.” I said. “I was disappointed.” No comment.

So no recipe for this one. Maybe it would have been quite nice cold. We’ll never know. But I can highly recommend a hot French white bean soup that I think you’d like, brought to you straight from Ernest Hemingway gallivanting through the Pyrenees, with or without his fave absinthe: Hemingway White Bean Soup.

great lunch on a rainy day in Paris

Hole-in-the-wall Edokko in a high rent district

Poor old soupsong.com. It’s been flat on its back for over 2 years now, while I’ve been painting the town rouge in Paris. “Get off your derrière, Mom,” says daughter Meg. “What the world needs now is soupe. You get your act together and I’ll take it from there, tech/design wise.”

Pretty irresistible, administering the soup cure to the soup site. Just what I was telling my chere amie Christine this week on rue du Faubourg St. Honore over a bowl of…wakame udon. There we were at hole-in-the-wall Edokko, set akimbo to the Louvre and Cardinal Richelieu’s Palais Royale, and charging a cool 9,50 euro ($15.00) for a bowl of Japanese soup. “Start right here with the udon, Pat,” counselled la belle Christine. “People will think you’re really crazy to report on Japanese soup from the Land of Haute Cuisine.”

So, dear readers, it is my great pleasure to invite you back to the world of soupsong.com and to serve you a bowl of udon.

Mmmmmmmmmmm. Thick chewy noodles in a fragrant broth with seductive bright green fronds of the fabulous wakame seaweed. I’m just a couple steps from the Seine, but it sure smells like the salt spume of the ocean here at Edokko. I didn’t have the recipe on my site, so: how to find the recipe, get the ingredients, and test it?

In fact, “Little Japan” in Paris is pretty much located on rue Sainte-Anne, a stone’s throw away from Edokko and named in 1667 to honor Louis XIV’s mom, Anne of Austria, upon her death. It’s a short little street in a very old part of town, 4 blocks long and serpentine. As you’d expect in Paris, it has art galleries, wine shops, beauty salons, lingerie stores, antique dealers, hotels, tabacs, a brasserie, and TWENTY-ONE JAPANESE RESTAURANTS.

I was not surprised. There are some 25,000 Japanese living in Paris, and nearly a million Japanese tourists visit in the course of a year. Japan has some 450 companies in France with about 57,000 employees. But there’s a downside: it’s called Paris Stress Japonnaise.

Harriet Rochefort, author of French Toast, has done the research. Japanese are even more perplexed by the French than Americans are. Who knew? It’s not just the language barrier, she says, it’s the nuances; the nonverbals; the fact that the French talk a mile a minute, change the subject constantly, aggressively attack some topic to get a laugh, go ballistic, then shrug philosophically. All, really, for fun-except that Parisien Japanese horribly miss calm and discipline in their lives. Dr. Hiroaki Ota in Paris has 715 patients at his psychiatric clinic at Ste. Anne’s hospital in the 14th arrondisement for Paris Stress Japonnaise. Japanese businessmen say darkly, “French talk as if they are strolling. The conversation doesn’t go anywhere.”

Totally frustrating! Totally maddening! Totally stressful!

What’s the cure? You see it in front of you: a nice calming bowl of soup. The ingredients were totally easy to find at Ace Mart at 63 rue Ste.-Anne-and you should have no trouble finding them either. I recommend making a bowl of Wakame udon for lunch today.