Soup & Bread 1/16/13: Our Neighbors to the North

When we cooked up the themes for the 2013 soup season (on a napkin, over cocktails and pork buns at Graze in Madison), we were aiming for a list of ideas/prompts that could be both focused enough to offer weekly structure and guidance, but still expansive enough to allow for diversity and wild flights of fancy. Last week, with soups inspired by “our neighbors to the north,” I think we hit the sweet spot.

“North,” of course, could mean anything from Kenosha to the Arctic Circle, but our soup cooks met the challenge head on. We had “UPer’s Delight” soup from Meredith Neuman, all the way from Massachusetts to participate in Soup & Bread. She paired a light vegetarian stock with hardy kale, twice-smoked kielbasa and, yes, Great Northern beans. Mana Food Bar chef Jill Barron honored her French-Canadian heritage with a spicy yellow split pea soup, the quintessential soup of the Quebecois. And we had not one but two Minnesota wild rice soups: One, from John Roeser, was so rich and thick that it was dubbed, admiringly, “chicken pot pie soup.” The other, from Lynette Schroeter, was lighter and nuttier, thanks to the addition of almonds, but no less satisfying.

We also had gallon upon seemingly endless gallon of a fantastic booyah, the community-soup staple of Northern Wisconsin, courtesy of Mike and Cindi Webber. Mike even went to the trouble of printing out the section on booyah from the Soup & Bread Cookbook, and posting it as supplemental reading material. Whaaat?

The last two cooks took things to the far, far north, with Sarah Steedman’s  “Snow White Potato Soup” (above) topped with green onions and lingonberry jam (spiked with a shot of Hendrick’s gin), and Alison True’s “Snowballs at Night”– a tart Norwegian blueberry soup served at room temp with a “snowball” of whipped cream. Even our DJ Mike Bulington got into the spirit of things, with a set  of northerly music that included Neil Young, the Replacements,  Buffy Sainte Marie, and some seriously obscure Canadian folk. All proceeds – a cool $556 – are going to the Irving Park Community Food Pantry.

COMING UP THIS WEEK: “The Ocean,” with soups from Tangleweed’s Paul Wargaski, artist and teacher Susannah Kite Strang, entrepreneur Bryan Rosendale, and cooks from the Marjorie Kovler Center, the beneficiary of this week’s donations, plus bread from Publican Quality Meats and La Farine. Oceanic music provided by Chicago Reader music writer Peter Margasak. See you Wednesday!