Let's get this over with

My distaste for cream soups has been well established in earlier posts. This is entirely a personal aversion, but one that I was unable to indulge, as I still had three to get through. After putting them off for months, I decided to get all three - cream of asparagus, cream of canned asparagus, and celery cream soup (p86) - completed in a single batch.

First, I had to prepare the pureed vegetables. The recipe doesn't give any direction about how these are to be prepared, only that you need the pureed vegetable ready to stir into the soup. I cooked down the celery in a saucepan in much the same way as I'd cook onion, but the asparagus I boiled until soft.


I then pureed each of these in the food processor, as well as some drained canned asparagus. Once I had ready my three bowls of mush, in various unappealing shades of green, I started on the soup.

I started by finely chopping an onion (in the food processor, since it was already out) and cooking it in butter. Then I stirred through flour and cooked that for a minute or so, before gradually adding the liquid - mostly milk with a little water.


When the soup mixture had boiled and thickened, I separated it into three bowls, and added the veges and seasoning. The fresh asparagus had a little sugar added for some reason, while the canned version has no seasoning beyond salt and pepper, but is garnished with paprika. The celery soup is flavoured with chicken stock powder.

I knew the soups would be essentially bland without generous seasoning, so I added plenty of salt and pepper - perhaps too indiscriminately, since the celery one already had that salty stock powder in it. When I actually tasted the soups, the celery was definitely over-salted.


I sat down with three bowls of soup, which may seem like a lot, but I had no expectation of finishing any one of them. I did eat more than I'd anticipated, but (if you look past that oversalting on the celery) all three were remarkably boring in flavour, and unpleasantly lumpy in texture.

I'll see if I can use my leftover soups in some way (a pasta bake or something, maybe?) but it's possible they'll just end up in the bin. I don't see myself eating any more of it as they currently taste. But that's ok, because now that I've done these three, I never have to make another cream soup again!