"Of soup and love, quoth Thomas Fuller, the first is best ..." Agree or
not, you'll probably endorse the rest of the epigraph: Soups do nourish the
young, stoke the fires of adults, comfort the old. [1]

East-Asian noodle soups have a pillar in the comfort-food Pantheon (a big
one: bigger than pizzas, maybe even than sandwiches). My home region on the
US Pacific coast [2] has a few million people and a five-digit restaurant
count. Thousands of these restaurants are operated by Asian, including
East-Asian, immigrants -- Chinese, Korean, Philippine, Thai, Singaporean,
Macanese, etc. etc. The bewildering variety of soups offered includes those
with fresh hand-pulled Chinese wheat noodles or soft rice noodles (fun);
clear "thread" noodles of rice or beans or whatever (example below); filled
"dumplings" (which is becoming the new US sense of that word, by the way)
from Korean Mandu to Siberian Pelmeni. (Which seem to be the same thing
adapted in different cultures. A food historian may one day locate the
Proto-Indo-Raviolum.)

It is easy to knock off very satisfying soups on East-Asian principles.
Here's a little example.

Having a couple of freshly roasted chickens on hand, I boned them and
chilled the meat (for fricassee next day to a friend's recipe). The bones
and scraps (with deliberately generous meat bits) went into a stockpot with
fresh vegetable scraps (skipping the step, for more flavorful stock, of
roasting the bones to further caramelize), covered scantly with water.
After some six hours simmering, the liquid was strained, cooled, defatted,
and frozen for other use: a first-press meat stock (rigidly gelled when
cold, and intensely flavored), which also carried off most of the fat.
Often in this situation, remaining solids contain good flavor, available for
the extracting. Just as wineries make a "second pressing" from crushed
grapes (using it to distill the clear second-press brandies: marc, grappa,
or commercial food-grade grape alcohol, which tastes faintly like a marc).
More water and fresh vegetable scraps therefore joined the stockpot, and
simmered overnight, 12 hours or more, barely bubbling. Yielding a second,
flavorful strained broth. (After which I added a little more water to the
hot dross, let it steep a little, and strained that also into the second
broth.) This secondary broth made, as usual, a fine clear soup (of which,
by the way, a little was eventually left over, and it too gelled nicely,
though less firmly than the first-press stock).

East-Asian soup cooks have some venerable tricks. One (omitted this time)
is slices of fresh ginger in broth-making. Another includes one or more
members of the onion family in the finished soup. Less obvious maybe is to
include the cabbage or crucifer family -- baby Bok Choy, Nappa cabbage, a
little mustard green -- which can add heartiness and complexity, even as a
minor ingredient of a soup. This particular soup, beginning as
second-pressing poultry stock, received baby Bok Choy quartered lengthwise,
chopped celery, and part of a bunch of fresh chives (European, not
scallions -- they were on hand, and they're good for this). The broth
cooked a few minutes, gently, with these vegetables. I then added dried
Chinese "thread" noodles from sweet potato, which cook in a few minutes in a
hot broth without further heating. Any kind of noodles would do, either
cooked in the broth or separately and then added (a common Chinese method).
The thread noodles this time came with hot-and-sour "seasoning" packets
(Ramen style) which were added sparingly while the vegetables cooked, giving
salt and flavor. With plain noodles I often use crushed fresh garlic and-or
ginger, hot pepper paste, or, of course, whatever sounds good. The "Hot
Bean Sauce" from Har Har Pickle Food Factory (Taiwan) is an outstanding
versatile condiment with a faithful and warranted Chinese following, besides
a sonorous name. If still needed, I then add salt or soy sauce. This time,
just before serving, I added a little diced cooked chicken meat and the rest
of the bunch of fresh chives, chopped. The chives really made this
particular soup. It started as a meat broth because that was handy, but it's
not necessary -- vegetables and seasonings can do the job. Also, if you
ever cook at home any of the famous brothogenic pot dishes like Tafelspitz,
bollito misto, or pot-au-feu (again cousins of each other), not only do
these make fine broth, but they leave still-flavorful tender meats.
Portions of which can be sliced off and frozen, for tossing into a quick
noodle soup later.


Notes:

[1] That begins the soup chapter in the popular 1950 US _Gourmet Cookbook,_
published by the magazine of the same name under Earle MacAusland and a main
US high-end cookbook of mid-century. Not to slight other and earlier books
with elements of this, such as Morrison Wood's (reviewed in detail in 1992
in ). Currently archived at http://tinyurl.com/49xl6
..

The 1950 "Gourmet" has its limitations but also its charms, such as
philosophical chapter openings. For instance, a mini-tutorial on "cook
until done" (instead of pretending exact timing instructions). Sydney Smith
composing a salad and eating it, then composing a poem called "A Recipe for
Salad" ("fate cannot harm me, I have dined today"). The Selkirk Grace
(uncredited) opening the Meats chapter; French-English arguments over sauces
and religion.

I don't know how far the new second-edition _Gourmet Cookbook_ preserved
these signature touches. But the original remains easily accessible in the
used market (and many homes).


[2] San Francisco (population some 400,000 in 1900, later surpassed by Los
Angeles and then San Diego), for the first 70 years of California statehood
was the principal city and port of the US Pacific coast. From the late
1800s it also housed "the largest Chinese settlement in the United States."
Quirks accompanied the boom-town era after the Gold Rush. Labor was so
expensive and shipping so cheap on some routes, for instance, as to make it
economical to ship laundry to China for cleaning. US drug laws also began
there, in 1876 against opium dens (that and quotation above from ISBN
0231035721). Since the 1970s, nearby suburbs boast a large ethnically
Southeast-Asian population. Local public information today can be found
printed in English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Russian. In late
years even a striking fraction of living Canadians has relocated to the
area. (Reports on their ethnic foods may follow.)


[3] A good reference in English on East-Asian pastas (omitting Asian Russia,
unfortunately) is Linda Burum's _Asian Pasta,_ 1985 (ISBN 0943186218 or
0943186234). FYI, some people in the US have the habit of saying "Asian"
when they mean much more specifically East- or Southeast-Asian (not Persian,
Pakistani, Anatolian, or even Siberian, though they be Asian too). Since
not all English speakers understand that particular usage, I spell out what
part of Asia I mean.


-- M. Hauser . Support your local restaurant!


--------
"_Zakuski_ can be a great trap. When Melba, the famous soprano, went to
supper with the tsar . . . very hungry after singing at the opera . . . she
innocently and eagerly applied herself to the magnificent buffet, which
included every kind of hot and cold _hors d'oeuvre._ She had just reached
saturation point when dinner was announced.

"This experience, in more modest form, has befallen many unsuspecting
foreigners visiting a Russian house for the first time. When you find a
table covered with beautiful dishes you naturally assume it to be the main
meal. Too late you discover that soup with _piroshki_ and pork fed for
weeks on Hungarian wine are waiting in the kitchen till appetites have been
suitably stimulated.

"The Russians laugh kindly at protests but expect you to go on eating, like
the host in Gogol's _Dead Souls,_ who rebuked his guest for lack of appetite
.. . ."

-- Nicolaieff and Phelan (1969)