Soup, Salad, or Half a Sandwich? Give Me All Three.
The perfect meal—my chunky potato soup with leeks and onions; a cold, lemony, crunchy baby gem salad; cheddar and blue cheese toasts. Don’t go out. Stay home. It’s better.
IF THERE’S A MORE THRILLING MINOR DILEMMA than “Do you want soup, salad, or half a sandwich?” I sure don’t know what it is. Offer me the moon and the stars, why don’t you?
I call it a dilemma rather than a question because this glorious lunch-spot query has haunted me all my life. Why must I pick? I want all three.
Unfortunately—or fortunately—I’d choose my own potato soup over just about any soup I’m offered at fast-casual lunch spots or anywhere else, with the exception of my lentil soup.
I’ve been making potato soup since I was a kid, the way I have quite a few dishes in my repertoire, because my late mom Tom Sawyered me into becoming a pre-adolescent sous chef. I was happy to peel the potatoes, dice them, wash the celery, cut up the onions, stir when she asked. Anything I could do to grab her attention in a family with five kids, I did. And I loved every minute of it.
And since we were a family of seven, she always made enormous pots, pans, bowls, baking dishes, and trays—vats, really—of simple and good food. The potato soup was plain old russet potatoes, a couple of big onions, celery, water, and a lot of milk. I remember the slick of butter that floated on top. There would be zero leftovers.
When I went away to college, I’d make this soup and my housemates would laugh and ask, “Is the basketball team coming over?” Because all the recipes I’d memorized and brought with me from home were for a family so big the kids competed for seconds.
A little request:
Please hit the ❤️ button at the bottom of this newsletter if you’ve enjoyed visiting our garden of salad. 🍅
But my housemates liked it. We ate it hot and cold. (I was a black pepper fiend back then, and I put so much in one batch that my roommate’s visiting brother went to the hospital thinking he was having a heart attack—even though he was probably only 20 years old—when he actually had heartburn, presumably from my soup.)
When I finally got out of college and started cooking all the time, because I really enjoyed it, I became what I believed to be a fancy person. And a fancy person was someone who used buttery Yukon Gold potatoes and leeks instead of onions and Idahos. I added stock to replace the plebeian water, grated in some nutmeg, played around with a ratio of milk and cream, and sometimes pureed it, like a rustic vichyssoise.
My fanciest version ended up in Food & Wine magazine, where it is one of their most saved soup recipes.
Now, I’m just me—a person who wears athletic socks and clogs with pants that should probably be in the Early American History Museum— but I still love leeks. So now my potato soup mixes one or two leeks with whatever onions I have in my onion bin. This started out of necessity—I had one leek leftover from a different dish—but it turned out so nicely I kept doing it. You get a deep allium backbone from the onion; sweetness and ethereal allium perfume from the leeks. And I decided that the dusty brown russets my mom used create the most desirable, chowdery-brothy texture. After you cook the soup, you mash it a few times with a potato masher so some of the potatoes dissolve into the broth while others stay chunky.
