Tales of Soup and Fiber
"Oh, I do so love soup," Einida exclaimed. "But how difficult it is to find one that is delicious, nutritious, and also filling."
What was it, I asked myself, that made my Lab Partner such an advocate for soup? Which of its qualities did she most highly prize?--the taste? the fluidity? the texture? the temperature? What was it that so inspired her passion?
I had, years ago, devoted a not-inconsiderable amount of time to the study of soup and its making. It was an engaging subject that required many experiments. It lead to my discovery of "souponification," that magic alchemical moment at which vegetables and water join together and metamorphose into actual soup.
I once developed an onion soup recipe that was delightful to taste, but it was dreadfully time-consuming to execute. Most onion soups done in the classic style of "Soupe a l'Oignon au Fromage" start with a beef base. I, determined to not be outdone by the French, decided to make an onion soup that was as tasty as the Gallic original, but without that bovine taint. So by taking a standard recipe and carefully modifying it over about ten iterations I finally came up with a recipe that satisfied me:
Viktor's Vegetable Onion Soup
6 Large onions thinly sliced
6 T butter
1.5 t salt
1.5 t ground mustard
.5 t Thyme
3 T soy sauce
3 T burgundy cooking wine
0.5 t White Pepper
6 cups Vegetable stock (3 cubes of Vegetable bullion)
Stale Baguette
Cheese (provolone, Gruyère, or Swiss)
Cook onions, butter, salt for 40 minutes on medium heat. Stirring frequently.
Add Thyme & Mustard and cook additional 10 minutes
Prepare stock. Using 3 cubes of vegetable bullion.
Lower stock to a simmer. Add Soy, Wine, white pepper, and Onions.
Simmer for 1hr on low heat or until “souponification” happens. Stirring occasionally.
Fill a proper Onion Soup Bowl (must have a handle) to 0.75% full.
Serve soup with stale baguette cut into 1/4” tall medallions floating on top of soup covered in cheese.
Finish the Crust of the cheese with a flame thrower or a few seconds in a broiler.
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In seeking the key to Einida's happiness I had no time to indulge in the time-consuming preparation of my "11 Ingredient Vegetable Onion Soup." Instead, I decided to explore, by means of experimentation, the effects of temperature on feelings of satiety. Could temperature, I wondered, make substances more palatable and induce the mental state of well-being? (I'd noticed that when I ingest liquids heated over a certain temperature, I have experienced long-lasting feelings of comfort.)
And so I hurried to the Biology Lab and started mixing.
I combined chicken-flavored bouillon cubes with psyllium husk formula. I heated the water to a temperature that would melt the bouillon. Then I mixed in the bouillon, and after that slowly stirred in the fiber.
The final stage of the experiment was to taste the oddly-colored soup. I bravely placed my straw into the brew and sipped.
I winced. The psyllium husk formula was orange flavored! As a result, the soup was unexpectedly flavored like a Chinese chicken or duck dish. Not unpleasant, but not quite comforting, and certainly too metropolitan for taste buds seeking simplicity.
Undeterred, I tried again, mixing unflavored psyllium husk fiber with the bouillon. This time I learned the painful lesson that using a straw to consume soup tends to distort one's sense of the soup's temperature. I singed my tongue.
"Einithaa! I neeth you to tathe thith enchanthing elixther."
She, with great hesitation, took a sip. Her eyebrows rose in surprise, and she said, with enthusiasm, "It's not bad at all. It's actually much better than I expected. A little thick, perhaps. But with a lovely chicken flavor."
And so ended my second experiment with fiber soup. The concoction failed to satiate me. I must find the balance between a soup that is too hot to drink, and one that has become a cold, gelatinous sludge. I will seek what in Middle English was called "lukewarme," which is not, as most would believe, the state somewhere between hot and cold, but rather the state of a substance that was once hot and has since cooled down. It is only a "lukewarme" soup that can be both hot enough to dissolve bouillon and cool enough to drink through a straw.