Eleanor Hartley
The Cupboard That Carries You Through to Spring
There is a particular sort of January evening when the wind is doing its worst against the kitchen window and the last thing you want is a trip to the shops. This is where a well-stocked cupboard earns its keep. A bag of split peas, a few tired-looking roots in the veg basket, and a tub of stock from the freezer will give you a bowl of soup far better than anything you could buy.
The winter pantry I keep is deliberately plain. Dried pulses do the heavy lifting: red lentils, yellow split peas, pearl barley, butter beans, haricot, chickpeas. Alongside them, onions and leeks that keep for weeks in a cool dark place, carrots, parsnips, swede, celeriac, and a few floury potatoes for body. Add dried herbs, bay leaves, a jar of tomato purée, a tin or two of chopped tomatoes, a piece of smoked bacon or a ham hock, and a handful of dried mushrooms, and you have the makings of a dozen different dinners.
Soaking and Cooking Dried Pulses Properly
Getting pulses right is mostly about time and a little patience. Red lentils and split peas need no soaking at all; they will collapse into a purée in twenty to sixty minutes and thicken a pot beautifully on their own. Larger beans are a different matter. Soak butter beans, haricot, or chickpeas in plenty of cold water for eight to twelve hours, then drain and rinse before cooking.
A few practical points that make a real difference:
- A pinch of bicarbonate of soda in the soaking water, about a quarter of a teaspoon per litre, helps soften beans in hard water areas.
- Never cook dried kidney beans without boiling them hard for at least ten minutes first, then simmering until tender. This is a genuine safety matter, not an old wives' tale.
- Hold back on the salt until the beans are soft. Salt early can leave older beans stubborn and gritty.
- Rough timings for a gentle simmer: haricot sixty to seventy-five minutes, butter beans sixty to ninety, chickpeas ninety to two hours, split peas forty-five to sixty, red lentils fifteen to twenty.
If you keep a pressure cooker, it will halve those times and is worth the cupboard space for winter cooking alone.
Roots, Alliums and Building the Base
Good soup is built, not thrown together. Start with onions or leeks, sliced not diced, sweating gently in a knob of butter with a spoonful of rapeseed oil for a good ten minutes. Add a pinch of salt straight away; it draws out the water and stops them catching. You want them soft and sweet, not browned.
Next, the roots, cut into roughly one and a half centimetre cubes so they cook evenly. Carrot and parsnip for sweetness, swede and celeriac for depth, a potato or two if you want a thicker, velvety finish. Stir in a tablespoon of tomato purée and let it cook out for a minute, then add your dried herbs and any spices at this stage so they bloom in the fat rather than tasting raw later.
If you are using bacon, lardons, or a ham hock, brown them first and use the rendered fat to start the vegetables. That single step is what turns a thin vegetable soup into something that tastes as though it has been simmering all afternoon.
A Stock Worth the Name
Stock is the quiet difference between a decent soup and a memorable one. Keep a bag in the freezer for chicken carcasses, ham bones, and clean vegetable trimmings, avoiding brassica stalks and potato peelings, which turn bitter. Cover with cold water, add a bay leaf, a few peppercorns, and a sprig of thyme, then simmer very gently for two hours. Strain, cool, and skim the fat.
Freeze it in old milk bottles or five hundred millilitre tubs so you always have a base to hand. For a vegetable soup, a parmesan rind dropped into the pot adds a savoury note, and the soaking liquid from dried mushrooms is almost as good as stock on its own. Do not throw it away.
Seasoning, Herbs and the Cream Swirl
Season at the end, always. Pulses absorb a surprising amount of salt, and you cannot take it back out. Taste, add, taste again. Then think about acid: a squeeze of lemon juice or a teaspoon of cider vinegar at the last moment sharpens everything and makes the flavours sit up.
Fresh herbs go in at the end, dried ones earlier. Curly parsley, chives, and thyme are the reliable winter trio. A grating of nutmeg over a potato or celeriac soup is a small thing that tastes like a large one.
And then the swirl. A tablespoon of double cream stirred through each bowl, or a spoon of crème fraîche that melts in ribbons as you carry it to the table. Browned butter with sage leaves, a drizzle of good olive oil, or a scatter of toasted seeds and crisp croutons will do the same job. None of it is essential, but all of it lifts a plain bowl into something you would happily serve to guests.
Three Combinations for the Week Ahead
- Split pea and ham. Sweat onion and carrot, add split peas, diced ham hock, bay, and stock. Simmer for an hour, then finish with a spoon of cream and a little English mustard.
- Butter bean, leek and celeriac. Soak and cook the beans, then simmer with leeks, celeriac, and thyme. Blend half the pot and leave the rest whole for texture.
- Red lentil and tomato. Onion, garlic, cumin, and coriander seed, a tin of tomatoes, lentils, and stock. Twenty-five minutes, then a good squeeze of lemon.
- Pearl barley, mushroom and parsnip. Use the porcini soaking liquid as part of your stock and stir through a knob of butter at the end.
Cook a large pot on a Sunday and it will feed you for days, improving as it sits. That, more than anything else, is what a winter kitchen is for.
