That was the week, that was

Well, we had planned to blog a bit more than we have but to say the least, this week has been busier than we expected.

I did get a chance to snap a quick video of us from one evening though to give you a sense of what a soup monger gets up to after a long day's toil in the soup mines.

What's in a name?

I suspect that Union of Genius is not the name that immediately springs to mind when you think "soup café." It probably breaks most of the rules for what to name your business. We could have chosen from a million soup based puns. Souper Bowl, Enter the Soup Dragon, What soup doc?, Soups you Sir!, Soupercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Well not that last one as we couldn't have afforded the sign, but you get the idea.

So why Union of Genius? Well the simple answer is we like the name. Elaine likes being called Chief Genius, I like being Mr Genius and we even have a Minor Genius handing out flyers as I type. (I don't know if she noticed the clause in her contract about being called Minor Genius...)

The longer answer is that it represents how we are trying to work. The union is about the way individual components are stronger together. Soup is good. Bread is good. Soup and bread is a union of genius, if you ask us. It's also about trying to find the things we like the most and putting them all in one place. Whether it's brilliant cakes or gourmet marshmallows, the best coffee or tea, it's about putting all the best stuff together. Not everything that's good goes well together, marmite & sticky toffee pudding never work, so the art is finding out what does. That's the genius.

More than that, it's working with suppliers to source local, sustainable ingredients where we can; with packagers to make sure that the packaging we buy is properly degradable; and then encouraging our lovely customers (I do so hope we get customers as it'll get lonely in the shop without them and there's only so much soup I can eat by myself) to either recycle it themselves or bring it back to us to do it. We know that cynics will dismiss this as marketing but keeping stuff out of landfill has been a passion of Elaine's for a long time now. She still volunteers with Edinburgh Freegle to keep goods in use and we're hoping that we'll be able to expand on that in some way through the café next year.

It's also about more than just soup. We're only a small place, we'll only be able to get 7 or 8 people sitting in comfortably but there'll be books to read and a place to cross them. There'll be free wifi so you can tweet while you eat or poke while you dunk and so on. Another of our plans for next year is the "soup group:" just like a book group but for soup.

So the idea is that we're bringing together many different ingredients and, like a good soup, blending them into something that we hope others will find delightful.

And truth about the name? That would be saying; after all truth is a three-edged sword. But we both love a tiny bit of hyperbole from time to time.

Soup with no gloop

The queen loved soup. She loved soup more than anything in the world except for the Princess Pea and the king. And because the queen loved it, soup was served in the castle for every banquet, every lunch and every dinner.
And what soup it was! Cook’s love and admiration for the queen and her palate moved the broth that she concocted from the level of mere food to a high art. (The Tale of Despereaux p.110)

Let's be clear about something. Elaine loves soup. She loves to cook it, to eat it and to share it with friends. Most of all she loves to feed it to her husband. Since we got married, teeth have been strictly optional for me. Decent gums and a long-handled spoon and I'm good to go.

So when we moved back to Edinburgh 2008 we were both looking forwards to rediscovering the great cafés, watering holes and hang-outs we loved 20 years ago. Most of all, Elaine was looking forwards to soup. Sure enough Edinburgh has great food in abundance. Except for the soup. Go to most cafes and you'll get a soup. Sometimes it'll be great (and we've had some seriously good soups) but usually it'll be cheap, probably served in a styrofoam cup and there'll be a nagging suspicion that it consists of left-overs. As Ottolenghi wrote recently,

Many cooks, including some serious chefs, treat the soup pot as a kind of culinary compost heap into which they chuck whatever happens to be lying around in the hope that it will miraculously be transformed.

Above all else, the magic ingredient that seems to be in 90% of the soups we've met in Edinburgh is gloop.

A sort of squishy, slightly gritty thickening agent made to bulk it out. It makes the kind of tomato soup that, when you look at it, it looks back at you. In a fight, you don't really know which one of you would win.

So we decided that we would make soup. Soup with no gloop. We would treat it as a food to be savoured. After all, soup is not just for a day, it's for life. This means that there would be no artificial thickeners, preservatives, colours or enhancers. No mass-produced concentrates, no cutting the dodgy bits off an old onion and hoping no one notices. No longer would soup be the cheap option on the menu, it would be the star. Our soups will never be padded out with corn starch, flour or suspicious purées. They will be made with vegetables, stock, herbs and spices and cuts of meat. And, of course, love.

Cook smiled “See? She said. “There ain’t a body, be it mouse or man, that ain’t made better by a little soup”  (The Tale of Despereaux p.233)