Day 26: Soup of the day

Today I am going to make up for the lack of Tunisian Orange Cake (“the Cake”) in my dream the other night by making one in real life. I should have plenty of time to squeeze it in amongst Savoy Cabbage Soup and Bacon Chop with Whiskey. I have a confession to make here - I have never made soup before in my life. I resolve to make it today using reduced vegetable stock, and to garnish it with some deep-fried cabbage strands (also known, inexplicably, as crispy seaweed).

There is, it transpires, another reason why the vegetable soups are made with chicken stock. There isn’t any vegetable stock. So I have to make mine with chicken stock. If there had been vegetable stock I’d have needed to get it on first thing to reduce it and thereby enhance its flavour. Never mind, the soup can wait a while anyway. I put my bacon in a pan of water to begin cooking it and draw the excess salt from the meat.

I crack on with the Cake. As well as being delicious, it is also flourless, so easily adaptable for coeliacs. Here’s how you make it: mix 7ozs sugar, 3½ ozs ground almonds, 1½ ozs stale breadcrumbs (gluten-free ones for a coeliac) and a level teaspoon of baking powder. Whisk four eggs and 7 fl ozs oil. Add them all together, with the zest of half a lemon and an orange. Fill your lined cake tin or, if you prefer, four small loaf tins. I fill three and a tiny loaf tin for tasting. For reasons that elude everyone who comes into contact with the Cake, you place it in a cold oven and set the temperature to 180ºC. While it bakes you juice the fruit and add 3oz sugar to make a syrup, brought to the boil and simmered for three minutes or so, flavoured with a couple of cloves and a stick of cinnamon.

The pan with the bacon in it is taking all fucking day to heat up. There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this. My partner notices that I have forgotten to turn the gas on. He also bails me out on the hot water/cold water issue for desalting the bacon, after we spend the first twenty minutes playing musical saucepans with my bacon and his strawberry jam. Shambolic.

Things start to come together as the morning, relentless and unforgiving, whittles away before my eyes. The Cake is in the oven, the syrup is made. I have all the work yet to do on the soup, but that should be pretty straightforward. This fucking bacon though is still refusing to cook. There is some rumbling elsewhere, and the truth slowly emerges. The meat of a pig when it is slaughtered is called pork. If that meat is cured, in salt, it becomes bacon. The cookery school has bought in a quantity of loins of bacon. Except they are not all technically bacon. Some of them have not been properly cured. They are technically pork. My piece of meat has come from one of these loins. Hence it is taking a lot longer to cook than it should.

While this situation is being discussed, I start on my soup. Sweating onion and potato, destalking cabbage leaves and so on. I stop to take the Cake out of the oven, skewer the top and pour copious quantities of the syrup over it. I garnish with the cinnamon sticks and leave to cool. I siphon one of the cakes off for myself, leave two for them and plate up the small one as a dessert. You must make this bad boy. It rules the world of cakes.

Back to the soup, I am anxious not to overcook the cabbage and rob the broth of what little flavour it is likely to enjoy anyway. I take my soup off the heat and pass it through the liquidiser. I taste it and correct the seasoning. Wait a minute. I haven’t seasoned it at all yet - a big mistake. The golden rule when seasoning a soup is beginning, middle and end. This enables the flavours to develop throughout the soup’s lifetime, rather than just thrusting them upon it at the end. Bollocks. All I can do now is get it right and hope for the best. The soup from yesterday’s demo was too salty, so I am nervous about adding too much. I get it to where I am reasonably happy with it (cabbage soup tastes pretty bland anyway).

I also make the whiskey sauce for my bacon/pork chops. This is a caramel sauce that could equally (more equally some would say) be served with dessert. The key with caramel is getting it to stop cooking at just the right time. Too early and it will just taste of sugar, with none of the bittersweet flavour you are looking for. Too late, and it will just taste burnt. I time it about right and add water to the pan to stop the cooking. Once the caramel and water are fully dissolved, in goes the whiskey. At this point, I am told to abandon the pork chops, and the joint goes in the oven to be roasted. It would have been sliced, egg and crumbed and pan-fried in clarified butter. Fortunately for me I have made enough veal Milanese in my time so I am not missing much.

Come tasting time, I plate up my soup with a small dollop of cream and the shredded cabbage that nearly burnt my arms off when I added it to the deep fryer (there is a lot of water in cabbage, even if you do dry it properly). I am papering over the cracks here - cabbage soup does not look appetising. Neither does it taste so apparently. The cabbage is fractionally under cooked, so it hasn’t pureed as fully as it should, meaning it is a little stringy in places. I actually prefer this, since I want my soup to have some texture and not feel like a smoothie. But they don’t.

Next, a discussion ensues regarding seasoning - my teacher thinks it needs more, I don’t. She adds more. I taste. She is right. My determination not to over season it has caused me to cajole my taste buds into under seasoning it. The best way to overcome this with soup is to ladle some into a small bowl and season minutely; if you do go too far you haven’t ruined the whole pan. Oh well, we live and learn. That’s what I’m here for after all, and it is nice from time to time to remind my over-inflated ego that by no stretch of even the most overactive imagination am I any kind of cook. Take it in, suck it up and deal with it next time. Hold on. Next time? Cabbage soup? There ain’t gonna be a next time….