Bean Soup with Pistou

"To me this bean soup smells of my grandmother's garden in spring. It is a wonderful way to make the most of young, homegrown vegetables if you are luck enough to have them." – Joanne Harris, My French Kitchen











July 17

It is just the point, when Harris says in her short caption above the recipe that it is "extremely therapeutic to make, especially if you make the pistou by hand." What better way to spend several hours? I could see a small place just down the road here in Madison, WI, called Bean Soup, and it would be a drop-in arrangement, with kitchen in the back, and various people filling in to cook this very soup together. We have made a similar recipe many times, from an oversized Williams Sonoma book, in which we had swapped out the pistou for a bouquet garni, such a wonderful little roll of plucked herbs to settle across the top of the soup and disperse a a flavor hard to contend with other standard techniques. It is complicated, with a lot of ingredients, from kidney beans to onion, carrots, stock zucchini and, brilliantly, artichoke hearts and vermicelli! We should never mistake variety of ingredients with a complication that is not worthwhile. It is all about time for gathering these items, preparing them, and watching the clock as each go through their very transformation. The beans for example are asked to soak overnight. Sautee the vegetables. Maybe most fun of all is the peeling of the tomatoes, a technique that kids enjoy because of the scoring and then the eventual easy skin peeling, leaving a vegetable that is considerably different in its raw state.

By the end of the process, pistou dashed across the top, it is an important part of the process to have been a part of the cooking because now the cook is able to pick out and detect each of the ingredients. We can taste the leek from the potato, the zucchini an amazing addition really and the real tomatoes add a certain earthy texture and taste that can't be duplicated by the canned variety. So, really, to go through these French recipes is a sort of plea to self and others to truly reconsider the elongated family process of cooking; consider the bean soup an alternative to any number of other activities that families might try to get involved in on a sunday afternoon. We have all come to realize that quality time tends to mean more than just being in the same house or same room even, often TV in the background. The bean soup, once made successfully, will be asked for again and again.