Stuck Between a Freezer and a Hard Place

The beginning of a four-week series on What's Left, in preparation for our national leftovers holiday on November 24. Also...stay tuned for a big announcement (I hope!) next week!

Dear Tamar:

What kind of soup should I make from a quart of last year’s frozen solid turkey gravy? Would a bastard faux Caldo Verde work? I’ve got a lot of CSA kale to contend with.

-Between a Freezer and a Hard Place

Dear Between a Freezer and a Hard Place:

When my husband and I first started dating, we decided to cook the 100 best soups. I’m happy to entertain protests here: Who chooses the 100 best? Does there exist an order inside the 100? Isn’t the idea of “best” antithetical to everything you’ve ever written or said about food and cooking?

I’d thought we’d used this list. But though New England Clam Chowder (76), (our first) is present, and so is Soupe à l’ognion (45) (our second or third), neither Bouillabaise—which cost us so much money it was scary, and took the better part of a day—nor Bourride, from its remains, is on the list. Nor is a spicy Thai squash and blood sausage soup, once shared with me by its maker—on her personal spoon!—on Sukhumvit, Soi 36. I put that among the finest foods, never mind soups, I’ve ever eaten. Caldo Verde isn’t there either. And the insanity of skipping Ribollita—which I remember stirring, while watching my husband-to-be fiddle with bike gears…

Maybe we free-styled. We cooked the soups in order of what we felt like eating. I don’t believe in bests. I was in love, and wanted anything that would bind me to the delightful human I loved for at least 100 more days—I probably made a bid for cooking 1,000. We stopped after five. We’ve been married almost a decade. Soup was never the point.

But soup was the conceit. I read about it endlessly. Would Consommé be silly or satisfying? Could Waterzooi could ever measure up to its name? Maybe I would have thought about soup that much anyway. Soup is forgiving, easy to stretch, affordable, ready to flummox culinary definitions. It’s an illustration of the optimistic, flexible spirit with which we all want to approach the act of cooking.

What I learned—other than that I love Pete and soups—is that my favorites don’t amplify a main ingredient through repetition. They harness their boldest element to quieter ones.

Not long after the aborted soup project, I spent a day cooking with Andy Baraghani, who’d offered to test recipes with me for my second book. I spent my whole day on Duck Soup, which we were certain was a winner—layers of wonderful, rich duck. When we finally leaned over bowls, to taste the sherry-inflected broth, with the viscosity and deep caramel of fond de veau, the pieces of tender braised duck leg, the wild mushrooms, everything was delicious…but boring.

I’d floated a crisp crouton spread with herby, cognac spiked-pate on top, though. We each ate half of the toast, part crisp, part sogging with glossy broth, a smear of pate providing luxury to each bite. I’m indifferent to duck soup. But strong duck broth with a pate-topped crouton deserves a place among the 100 best.

You have frozen gravy, which is like rich stock. It’s been thickened with flour, giving it extra body. Since learning the lesson of rich broth and dry bread, I suggest avoiding entirely adding more meat. Instead, use your rich, meaty liquid to infuse and illuminate simpler things.

First, heat it and thin it with water, whisking. Then taste it, and when it has the light stickiness but strong flavor of a rich stock, begin. Use it for a potato-and-kale-only Caldo Verde, or if you’ve used the kale, for a cabbage version. Or, use it as the broth in onion soup, or as the base of congee—rice cooked in stock. Or make a panade: layered toasted bread, rubbed with garlic, covered in gravy stock, with cheese on top.

All last year’s investment in the turkey and gravy will be realized: in the seasoning of vegetables, suffusing of onions, coating and enriching of rice or stale bread. There’s something optimistic about such creations, some sense of balance that I, at least, seek wherever I can find it.

Dear cook, in the soup pot, make the world you wish for. Combine meaty with spare, flavorful with bland, wet with dry. Give each element what it lacks, rather than more of what it has—an understandably too common tendency, within the soup pot and without. A truths will become evident: with soup, you’re never stuck.

Stay tuned for the next installment of the Kitchen Shrink on What’s Left. Plus that announcement I mentioned…