En Passant: Souped up for winter

THAT COLD weather on Thursday last week really caught me by surprise. I’d heard the wind blasting all Wednesday/Thursday night, which I suppose should have been a clue that something was changing, but I didn’t realise how much it had changed until I sat down on the loo (if you’ll excuse the image) and involuntarily squealed like a girl. The loo seat gets me every year. And again I got an answering squeal of sympathy from Teaspoon the parrot, and had Doris tapping at the door and asking, “Are you alright in there?”

Yep it was nippy, and the wind that continued all day cut right through you. It got me thinking, It’s time for soup, and then wondering what soup I could make that would be a change from usual old standards like vegetable soup, chicken soup, leak & potato soup, pea soup, bean soup and good ol’ cream of tomato.

There’s nothing wrong with any of those mentioned, but what could I make that would be somewhat different like, I dunno, peanut soup, without being hideous like carp soup? I kid you not, carp soup is traditional in Czechoslovakia, and is made with carps’ heads and offal, onions and vegetables, and Czechs anticipate this concoction with relish as part of their Christmas Eve supper. Call me a boring old Anglo-Saxon/Celt/African mongrel if you will, but I’d rather have a traditional English mince pie.

And then I thought, Hold on, what soup have I always known about but never tried making?

Well, I’ve never made fish soup, which I think I have only ever had twice, once in France and once here in Vryheid at some organisation’s AGM or induction dinner. It’s OK is fish soup, but I dunno, it’s a bit sort of… fishy somehow.

Then, I have never made mulligatawny soup, the curried soup that my mother used to make for my dad, ol’ Dave, who used to swear by the soup’s remedial benefits when it came to babalaas. Ol’ Dave, who was a doctor, and who presumable knew a thing or two about diagnostics and prescriptive medicine, used to say that the best thing for a babalaas was a plate of mulligatawny soup and a cold beer for breakfast.

I make curry as often as Doris will allow me to, and the “gravy” that is created in the curry-making process is delicious, so I expect I could make a very tasty mulligatawny soup. Bang “mulligatawny soup” into the Internet (“mulligatawny”, as I understand it, simply means “pepper water”) and you’ll get a million recipes, none of the ones I looked at being exactly alike. They seem to use more vegetables – celery, carrots, leeks and apples for example – than I’d use in making an ordinary curry, so I reckon you could use what you liked. Jamie Oliver, that loose-lipped pom, uses butternut, which I’ve also tossed into an ordinary curry as a thickener.

The one soup which I’ve known about almost all my life but never had is bird’s nest soup (and turtle soup, come to think of it). Bird’s nest soup we knew about as kids, don’t ask me how, and as a kid I couldn’t understand it at all.

The most visible bird’s nest that we were familiar with would have been the weavers’ nests that we see hanging from willow trees next to every pond in southern Africa. I couldn’t figure this out because most weavers’ nests that I’d examined were made of tightly woven grass strands with the inside lined with fluff, feathers and bird droppings (to put it politely). Call me an unimaginative child but I could not see how even the Chinese could turn these ingredients into a palatable soup.

Turns out they don’t. Nope, birds’ nest soup is made from the nests of particular swifts, a little bird that is similar to the swallows that we get here, and which here make their nests of mud which they “cement” to the undersides of roofs’ eaves and bridges.

The birds whose nest they use to make soup, the white-nest swiftlet (Aerodramus fuciphagus) and the black-nest swiftlet (Aerodramus maximus), for reasons only known to the birds themselves, make their nests not from mud but from their own spit. They string strands of saliva together to make their nests, like a shallow cup stuck to the side wall of a cave.

This spit apparently is rich in calcium, magnesium, iron and potassium, all of which are obtainable in a mineral supplement sold at Clicks, so who knows what the Chinese think they’re getting out of it. Mind you, these are the same people who think rhino horn is a pick-me-up, or pick-me-John-Thomas-up to be more anatomically specific.

It must be the same people, the rich and stupid, because they must be able to afford both products. A bowl of bird’s nest soup will knock you back $30-100 in Hong Kong, and that’s US dollars. There’s a white nest and a red nest which can cost up to US$2,000 to US$10,000 per kilogram respectively.

I dunno. Why birds’ spit? I mean, if a tiny swallow’s spit can contain calcium, magnesium, iron and potassium, whose to say what’s contained in a slobbering bulldog’s spoeg? Or any slobbering dog for that matter. I’ve seen a dribble of spit hanging from a hungry dog’s muzzle that’s been over a foot long. You could build a real dog’s nest with enough of that, dried and stuck to the side of your garage, like a mutant dog’s basket.

Dog’s nest soup, why not? Someone in China would buy it.