La Recette du Jour

A surprising soup, a great preservative against winter colds.

Bourride is a classic Mediterranean fish soup which is somewhat less complicated and expensive to make than bouillabaisse. There are various local variations. In Sète they make it with monkfish on its own, but in Marseille they use a mixture of firm white fish. Some people serve the broth on its own, followed by the fish and vegetables with boiled potatoes and aioli. You can put the slices of bread in bowls and pour the soup over them. However this version is restrained and elegant - you could serve it as a first course at a dinner party. It is said that when the Greek gods got bored with Olympus they came to Marseille to eat bourride, this being the only food that was fit for the gods.

Note: don't be put off by the amount of garlic that goes into it. The soup itself tastes creamy rather than garlicky, and it's up to you how much aioli you spread on your bread.

This quantity serves 6-8 people.

Courtesy of Nick Nairn via ChasingDaisy.com. A simple and delicious soup that makes a light meal with bread and some cheese.

A summer recipe par excellence, and very quick to prepare. You might need to adjust quantities, according to taste and the size of the tomatoes.

Here is a quick-to-make soup which sounds implausible but is actually very nice. It can be eaten hot, warm or cold. As a variation, you could use Boursin or similar instead of vache-qui-rit.

An Elizabeth David mushroom soup. It doesn't sound terribly exciting but it preserves all the flavour of the mushrooms -- whether they are humble champignons de Paris or rustic cèpes.

A classic French soup ... delicious if carefully made.

A good warming soup that remedies the sometimes rather bland taste of pumpkin.

I love real Italian cooking and don't do nearly enough of it. Many traditional Italian recipes not only taste good but have the benefit of being vegetarian or nearly so, and not too fattening.

I expect there are as many versions of the Tuscan soup ribollita (reheated soup) as there are cooks. This is based on Ursula Ferrigno's recipe in Bringing Italy Home, and I like it because it's vegetarian. If you are a confirmed carnivore, you could easily add a ham hock or some bacon. As the name suggests, it's best reheated the day after you make it.

Vegetables can be varied according to taste and availability. I'm sure in Tuscany it always has cavolo nero in it, but you can't get that here, so I always use dark green Savoy cabbage.

Oil: you must use the best you can get for drizzling over the top; you can get away with slightly less good for the cooking, but it should be extra-virgin.

From this:

to this:

This bold experiment is the result of a discussion about what to do with left-over dressed salad. Normally it just gets thrown away, but I remembered reading about someone using it to make gazpacho. I though this sounded disgusting. But last night we had 14 people for dinner, and we made a huge fattoush salad: lettuce, onions, yellow pepper, tomatoes, cucumber, and mint, with toasted diced pitta bread thrown in at the last minute.There was so much I didn't have a bowl big enough, so I made it in my huge stockpot, and although we ate a lot there was a lot left over.

Given that it was in the stockpot, why not try it? So here is ... left-over salad soup!