A rum soup

So what do rum and soup have in common?

Before Christmas, Ms Genius and myself were at Provenance Wines for a spirit tasting night. Sort of like a seance but with significantly more spirits in attendance. While were still sober, our guide reached the rums and we ventured into some Chairman's Reserve Spiced Rum.

Throughout the discussion our guide had been mentioning "botanics" which, in my slightly fuddled state I had been understanding as botany bay. ("Botany Bay? Botany Bay! Oh no!") Once I realised my error I began to understand what he meant. The botanics refers to the mix of herbs, berries, spices etc that a spirit is distilled through. For example, gin must be formed of a majority of juniper berries. Least ways that's my understanding.

For soups this is what is called the mirepoix. In traditional French cuisine, mirepoix is a combination of "aromatics" (celery, onion and carrot) that forms the base of the dish. Varying the mirepoix changes the composition of the stock. At Union of Genius, most of our soups are made with a mirepoix with the thickening coming naturally from the vegetables (usually potato) as opposed to using a roux or (I shudder even to type the word in our blog) cornflour.

What this tends to mean is that our soups are heavily packed with vegetables. For example, to make ten litres of cream of wild mushroom soup we use 1.5kg of onions, 1.8kg of potatoes and 1.2kg of mushrooms along with garlic, porcini, herbs and spices. This means that a standard sized portion has about 150g of vegetables. To give you another example, caldo verde has 1.8kg of onion, 2.7kg of potatoes and 250g of kale so is even higher in vegetable content. (Kale works out at roughly 1 small handful per serving.) By weight, our soups often contain more vegetable than water.

But back to the rum. It's the balancing of the base that sets the foundation for the flavour and, of course, like rum, some soups work better when aged. Not all; a soup like Tomato Rasam is best when newly made and the citrussy top notes are fresh and bright. Compare that to the Winter 6 Veg Broth which is at it's best when it's been allowed to get itself together overnight to allow the flavours to infuse, and for the barley to make the broth silky.

One of the beauties of soup is, like spirits, there are so many variations. As we only opened in October we've been focusing on the hearty, deep flavoured autumn and winter vegetables or some of the more fiery middle-eastern combination. As spring rolls around we'll start bringing out lighter, fresher soups that are all about subtlety.

Unlike spirits, you don't wake up with a sore head and a mouth like a shag-pile carpet after a night sampling them.

But there's a thought. What about a night combining soup tasting, drinks and other sundry delights from a variety of artisan food producers. That's got to be a good idea...