WRITE TEAM: Potato soup can be a divisive topic

Winter is my time and now is my season – I make soup!

I tell my wife I’m a “soupier,” which is a bogus French word I invented to mean “soupmaker.”

I make killer potato soup. I mean it. Even if you don’t like potato soup, the stuff I make is superb. Bacon, chopped kale, leeks and onions and stuff; it’s great. Even my dad likes it.

With this said, it’s true that potato soup can be a divisive topic.

It all started with a cabbage and I don’t know where that cabbage came from. I didn’t buy it. We don’t usually eat cabbage. Somehow we had a cabbage, and I looked at that round, green thing and thought “Vitamin A. That’s good stuff!”

So I rummaged around the refrigerator and pulled out some stuff to go with it. Cabbage soup I’d make, and first time out, it needed attention. So along came potatoes, onions and some diced tomatoes, along with slices of leftover beef.

It turned out hot and good and healthy. My body thrilled to it. I could feel the heat of the soup and somehow I could feel all that good vitamin stuff pulsing into my blood stream. I’d taken a lousy cabbage, something that smelled skunky and nasty, and transformed it into damn good stuff.

I’ve learned since then that there’s a lot you can do with a cabbage.

Making a pseudo-Chinese soup is a lot of fun. As a soupier I have a treasury of noodles and pasta to pull from, so it’s an opportunity for rice noodles. I keep handy some dried mushrooms which come to life in the bubbling broth.

Black bean or lentil soup is great for you. I’ve got a recipe for goulash that was lifted from a German bar and uses green and red peppers to give you a great taste. It’s pretty filling. That’s really the closest I get to making stew, which is a whole ‘nother world, just as making chili is completely different – that chili scene is competitive and intense. Me, I make soup.

As a soupier, I can tell you that one secret is just having vegetables around. Carrots, potatoes, onions. A good vegetable soup is golden. It’s important to find a good chicken and beef stock. I usually use a brand called “Better than Bullion” and it gets doctored up with some spices. I save the salt for last since it’s easy to overdo it. One pro tip is to have rice vinegar around. It can bring up a soup. Another is that butter really can help sweeten up a soup and help a flat broth become more nuanced. White pepper is a useful secret.

With all this soupmaking, there’s yet another stunning soupier in the Volker Household and that’s my wife Linda, who makes Julia Child’s fish chowder. It fills the house with amazingly great smell. When she makes it, I pull out my copy of “Moby Dick” (it has a chapter on chowder!) and I read out loud Melville’s lines:

“. . . a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the apparently cheerless prospect before us. But when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh! Sweet friends, hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuits, and salted pork cut up into little flakes! The whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt.”

So the cold weather’s not so bad here and soup is spirit-lifting in cold times ... it’s a sport and it’s a science and it’s an art. You get the fun of chopping up stuff, the grade-school chemistry play with adjusting the taste of the broth here and there, and the great wholesome smell lifting up into the kitchen. And of course a nice hot cup of soup!

• Todd Volker lives in Ottawa with his wife and son, and they enjoy reading, kayaking, hiking, tennis and camping. He’s a lifelong learner with books in his hands. He can be reached at tsloup@shawmedia.com.