XL Cover Story: Bowl Season
Our favorite soups
By Dale Rice | Photography by Ralph BarreraNov. 17, 2005
» Click here to see the soups
It's not the cool temperatures, glowing embers in the fireplace or the chance to wear sweaters that thrill me when the real cold fronts finally sink into Central Texas.
It's the thoughts of soup — of warm, tantalizing, aromatic bowls of soup — that envelop me as the season changes.
|
|
» Click here to see the soups |
"I love it when it gets cold and I can get serious with soup," says Patricia Bauer-Slate, the owner of Sweetish Hill Bakery & Cafe, where homemade soup has been a staple for 30 years.
The problem is that — contrary to what goes on at Sweetish Hill — soup is mostly a throw-away dish in the South and Southwest.
That's my impression after more than 25 years of searching for tasty bowls of steamy broth in Texas and beyond.
Soup here is an afterthought in way too many restaurants, where the cooks are more likely to open a can or reconstitute a packaged mix than make a time-consuming pot from scratch.
That's in sharp contrast to the North I grew up in. Soup — often a meal unto itself — was as important as any other dish on the table, something to relish, a bowl of pride.
When soup-lover Bauer-Slate moved south, she didn't think she'd find many diners who shared her passion.
"Coming from Philadelphia, I didn't think we could give soup away because it's so warm so much of the time," Bauer-Slate says. "But it's way more popular than I would have guessed."
At Eastside Cafe, which has published two soup cookbooks, hot and cold bowls have been a mainstay for nearly two decades.
"Soup is everything to us," says chef and co-owner Elaine Martin, who gives co-worker Ruth Carter the credit for inspiring the dish at the cafe. "We sell a lot of soup. It's a big deal to a lot of people."
Even when she was growing up in Longview and Dallas, soup had a place in her family, Martin says. Then she pauses, and acknowledges with a smile, "My mother and my grandmother were Yankees, from northern Wisconsin."
So that's one problem: Soup is more of a northern tradition.
Second, soup isn't convenient. In the Austin area, where life seems to be revolving more rapidly, soup doesn't go with the flow.
"You've got to sit down with soup," Bauer-Slate says. "You can't be driving the car. You can't pick it up and chew on it. You've got to pay attention to soup."
That's true. It's a dish to be sipped and savored — when it's made well.
Fortunately, there are a number of Austin restaurants that care as much about soup as I do. In anticipation of colder weather, here are eight of those spots where soup is a labor of love.
