Cookbook author Anna Thomas on the power of soup (plus a recipe for roasted kabocha soup)
"I've been really thinking about this a lot. Soup is the portal to home
cooking," says Anna Thomas, author of the "Love Soup" cookbook. "You cannot make too terrible a mistake with soup. Don't we want to know how to take care of ourselves a little?"
Though she's hardly a familiar name today, Thomas is the one who in the early 1970s lured many a hungry idealist rebelling against a meat-and-potatoes childhood into the kitchen with "The Vegetarian Epicure," a seminal book that came out of nowhere to sell more than 1 million copies.
More than 30 years later, she has another new cookbook, "Love Soup," a collection of 100 soups and dishes to eat with them, that she hopes will lure a new generation into the kitchen in much the same way her first book did. Like so many cooks, she worries that people are losing touch with an essential skill and is determined to do her part to halt the decline.
Photo credit: Lawrence K. Ho/Los Angeles Times
It is a cool damp day in Brooklyn, NY and this article warmed me and my heart - it felt like going to a reunion of sorts. I too was influenced early on by Anna Thomas' Vegetarian Epicure. I was in college when it came out and I just located my copy which has not been looked at in at least two and a half decades but it still bears the evidence that I used it often in those days. More significant was learning that it was Ms. Thomas who made El Norte, a film I still recommend as one of my all time favorites. There is something about both of those projects of hers that I realize greatly influenced my sensibilities and my values. On top of all that I love making soup and my immersion blender is probably my favorite kitchen gadget and I cannot wait to get my CSA farm share this week and use some of that fall bounty to make one of the new soup recipes from this new wonderful sounding book. Thanks for making my day!
Posted by: B B Hirsch | October 15, 2009 at 08:24 PM