Potage is for Peasants?

I detected a briefly raised eyebrow last night when I announced the main part of our evening meal was to be a soup. Had that meant some powdery packet jobbie I could understand the doubt, likewise had I been using tins (though Heinz tomato is a slightly perverse glory of our national cuisine). But this was a very hearty mushroom (a packet of dried porcini and a paper bag of supermarket white 'shrooms) and veg deal, incorporating homemade stock. Nothing was left in the pan, so it can't have been too bad.

Perhaps the problem is that we tend to see such fare as only a starter. Or that both our Dear Leader (ever present) and Sternest Critic (home for Easter) know I (like any half reasonable home cook) sometimes play the potage card to use up things not at the throwing out stage, but past their peak. It is an aid to frugality then, but also can be a delight: the two need not be incompatible.

One of the best things I ate in my distant youth was the sorrel and potato soup dished up by my exchange buddy Patrick Mulot's mum in Montfort L'Amaury (I spent three weeks with them after he had been three weeks with us). No need for truffle oil etc, it was perfectly balanced, filling, smooth, delicious. They were far from rich, and I seem to think we ate it twice a week at least, but no matter.

Likewise the table d'hote dinner menu at small French restaurants and hotels will always include a soup, generally vegetable, that you know is the chef cooking to a budget (it doesn't hurt that the crisply crusted bread on the table accompanies it to perfection).

But both those would be starters.

Is it a fear of appearing to be poor peasants that relegates soup to a supporting role? I have read restaurant reviewers who would go further: they hint soup is not worthy of their taste buds, or inclusion in a starry meal, consigning several thousand years of creative cookery to culinary oblivion in a few arch words. How sad. How shallow.

I was then delighted that the tasting evening menu last Thursday at Mitton Hall featured soup. The carnivore list had French onion with gruyere crouton, and the vegetarians (Dear Leader played that role, and designated driver. My stay in the Gulag will hopefully be short) enjoyed a take on Jane Grigson's 1970s-classic curried parsnip soup. Both were excellent (the parsnip particularly so), and I admired the chef for having the courage to offer superbly realised simplicity.

By way of contrast, on a press trip to Michelin-starred restaurants in South West France I tasted a spoonful of soup made with ground ivy (not tree ivy, that's poisonous). It was part of another taster menu by a well-regarded (particularly by himself) chef scaling new culinary heights. Someone should have pushed him off, it was foul. Fine new soups may yet be discovered, but will any of them be as excellent as that sorrel and potato plateful Patrick's mum surely learned from her mother and on back to Parmentier's introduction of the spud into the French diet? Potage may be for peasants, but it satisfies. So no eyebrow should be raised when it's promoted to the main event.

Nearly Vegetarian II

As stated previously, we are not vegetarians, though meatless days are part of our flexible culinary schedule. But is it vegetarian if we substitute fish for the meat? I'm sure real veggies would say no.

Last night's effort then was meatless but not vegetarian, a fish pie made with pollock (doubtless soon to join the poor mackerel on the at-risk list as every chef seems to be lauding it now) and a mushroomy bechamel. The top was a mash made with spuds and parsnips about 67/33. Weirdly the bechamel smelled exactly like Heinz mushroom soup, which it wasn't, but that reminded me of the 1960s and 1970s thing of using tinned soups in dishes - Batchelors made a big thing of it. Nothing too wrong with that I suppose, but for the same price we got no additives and I am sure far more mushrooms.

When I make mash it tends to be with parsnips added, or a few cloves of garlic, to give the flavour a boost and add a different vegetable without using another pan. One of the few British veg currently in season parsnips are cheap at the moment, though had we ventured to the allotment through the mud and floods we could have had some for free. It feels like the rain hasn't ceased since about June.

And another tangent, prompted by that endless downpour. We are as a nation to spend £33 billion on quicker trains. We spent £13 billion on the big school sports olympics. At what point will some meaningful money be spent on our food security? We will not be able to rely on food from the countries now coming up on the rails economically; and one of them China is busy buying chunks of Africa for its own food safety. Orwell in the 1930s pointed out that we had been incapable of feeding ourselves in WWI when he and Cecil Beaton worked together on their school allotments in the drive to produce a bit more, and the situation has worsened since.