Soup to Nuts

1) While researching at the Deutsches Kochbuch Museum in Dortmund, I couldn’t figure out why the cookbooks tended to start with a chapter on soup. I had supposed they would put the most important main dishes, specifically meat dishes, first. I later learned cookbooks were traditionally ordered by the courses of a formal meal, and soup comes first. Hence, soup to nuts!

Davidis-Holle, Praktisches Kochbuch (1901)

2) Living in hostels for the second two weeks of my travel, I tired of belegte Brötchen (sandwiches), so when I got to Dresden and could buy and make food for myself, I thought soup would be different (and cheap). I didn’t want to get canned soup or a soup mix, though—I was willing to compromise some of my food principles for economy, but not all of them!

Funny aside about soup mixes: the first time I was in Dresden (2006), I stayed in a youth hostel a ways out of town that had kitchens for the guests to use. On a very strict budget, I had purchased a split-pea mix that I cooked up for dinner one night. Having traveled in old Communist Europe before (Czech Republic, Berlin), I knew not to drink the tap water. But when making the soup, I didn’t think to cook it with the bottled water I had gotten from the store. It turned out—how shall I put this?—crunchy. The soup was actually gritty from the hard water from the tap. Thank goodness the water in our Dresden apartment is potable! Saves money instead of buying it bottled, and even though you get a Pfand (refund) for recycling the large bottles, it’s surely better for the environment that I’m just reusing an old bottle. Probably all the Bisphenol-A has leeched out by now, so why replace it, right?

3) So, the first dish I cooked for myself here in Germany was mixed vegetable and potato soup, using the soup vegetables I had bought bundled at the grocery store. While chopping them at home, I realized I didn’t recognize all the ingredients: the carrot was obvious, but what looked like it might be a celery stalk turned out to be onion; there was some green herb; and parts of two tubers, one of which I think was celery root and the other I guessed to be a turnip. So even soup I made myself turned out to be foreign.

4) This blog post was prepared in a facility that processes nuts and may contain traces of nuts or nut products.