December 2020: SWISS SOUP THERAPY
“Without soup, the Swiss could not exist.”
— Nika Hazelton, The Swiss Cookbook, 1967
Frankly, I find baking cookies, cupcakes, and breads quite a cliché for a December theme with the season of Christmas and other pending holidays kicking into high gear. Plus, The Kitchen Scholar having a carbohydrate-rich theme does not make any sweet sense at the expense of the entire world grappling with the global pandemic (Sidebar: Happy Anniversary to the dreaded virus outbreak in Wuhan, China!) and large gatherings and party festivities getting cancelled to contain the spread. Instead, I am of the opinion that the holiday spirit can still thrive, albeit with simple and splendid soups that soothe the soul and provide warmth against the harshness of winter and mildly cold weather.
Narrowing the focus in the December feature is not really difficult because the soups from the Helvetic Confederation fit the description I am looking for. Soups capture the cultural core of Swiss lives and cantonal traditions, and why wouldn’t they be? Soups need water as a medium, and water is the chief natural resource of Switzerland. Even the Swiss federal government has placed water quality under the strictest regulatory standards to the extent that their tap water tastes naturally and incomparably pristine like it was harnessed fresh from glacier-replenished springs and groundwater. If a nation has the best drinking water in the world, then the most sensitive of taste buds can only marvel at how the purity of the aqueous body can emphasize the other ingredients that go into the soup!
By tradition, a Swiss soup, which contains vegetables and meat or freshwater fish, is a complete and balanced meal in itself because it was originally meant to satiate hunger rather than to stimulate appetite. For the sake of clarification, appeasing hungry urges does not necessarily translate to the Swiss shrugging off the diminishing returns from the same kind of soup at each table sitting for the rest of their lives. They actually do mind, after all, their country has all those wild mountain herbs at its disposal. Hence, the Swiss have no reason to stick with one alpine flavor profile in their soups when they can relish in the different combinations that bring them closer to nature.
Tourists nowadays may no longer find soups being the heart of Helvetic cooking due to the incessant in-your-face promotion of cheese fondue, as I had personally discovered in the dining establishments of Lucerne, Montreux, Zermatt, St. Moritz, and Grindelwald last August 2019. However, the spirit remains, just not in our literal understanding or mental pictures, because Swiss soups commercially manifest as compactly packaged broth cubes or thickly reduced bouillon concentrates.
Broth cubes, instant soup mixes and bouillon concentrates are often underlooked Swiss inventions but their conception by Julius Maggi single-handedly altered the landscape of food technology at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. A flour miller from the Thurgovian capital of Frauenfeld by trade, Maggi traced the growing malnutrition to married factory women lacking the time to cook vitamin-fortified soups for their families, leading him to formulate the cube based on flour and seasonings. In 1886, he perfected the dehydration process that enabled him to produce instant soup mixes. Within the same year, Maggi successfully extracted and blended the aromatic essences from different grains to create the all-purpose bouillon concentrate that rivalled glace de viande in flavor enhancement. All of these actualized ideas stemmed from the Swiss soups as foundational inspirations.
Perhaps the greatest misfortune of my travel to Switzerland last year was the wasted opportunity of sampling its rustic soups. I only recalled having a fancy pea soup (the cover photo) for my cousin’s birthday luncheon at the restaurant, Safran, in Montreux and a plain barley soup for dinner on my first night in Zermatt. While I could never replicate Swiss authenticity with the local water in my country and the lack of access to alpine herbs, they are not alibis that should hinder me or anybody outside of Switzerland from trying them out in the home kitchen. Swiss soups are gastronomic symbols of practicality towards time, trouble, and economy and we can all learn from that as a holiday therapy in the time of a pandemic.
