The change in seasons this time of year is palpable. The angle and quality of sunlight has shifted lower, and the kids are back in school. It’s important to cultivate things to enjoy for every season, so while the light fades and the days shorten, I urge everyone to do what is right and just. It’s time to start thinking about what kind of soup to make, and to put those plans into action. Below, I picked out some cookbooks that feature recipes for some of my favorite soup and soup-adjacent dishes. The cookbooks I listed are a microscopic fraction of all the cookbooks we have on the shelf at Mead and throughout the Monarch system, if the ones I like to use aren’t appealing. Click each cookbook title to see the Monarch catalog listing. 

The soup: Chili Con Carne
The book: The Enchilada Queen (2016) by Sylvia Casares

This is not strictly a soup, per se, but a soup-adjacent dish that I make all the time. I am not here to have the “is a hotdog a sandwich” conversation applied to what qualifies as a soup, versus a stew, and so on. We’re progressive soup connoisseurs round these parts, and won’t be confined by any narrow definitions. Chili equals soup, I tell you, and this one is so delicious.

I love the recipes in this book because I love Tex-Mex cooking and I enjoy the borderline complexity of Sylvia’s recipes. Her Chili Con Carne is incredibly tasty over the enchiladas she is famous for, but I use it as a Tex-Mex shakshuka base for breakfast quite often. Pour a cup or two into a hot, oily pan, and crack some eggs on top, cover until set. Serve with crusty bread or crispy potatoes, precious. It might ruin all other breakfasts by comparison, that’s how tasty this chili is. 

The soup: Dal
The book: Indian for Everyone (2014) by Anupy Singla

This is a great cookbook for those who enjoy Indian cuisine, but might be intimidated by long ingredient lists and unfamiliar cooking techniques. Singla’s cookbook is the best guide I have come across for home cooks looking to expand their repertoire. Dal in particular is a great dish to have in one’s arsenal because it is delicious, inexpensive, and good for one’s health as dal tends to be lentil-based. It’s also on the lower end of the scale for degree of difficulty, and the ingredients are forgiving. I was thrilled to learn that Alex’s Corner Market, located at 723 Center Ave here in Sheboygan, carries an astounding array of Indian cooking staples, if anyone is looking for a particular variety of dal. A few years ago there was nowhere in town to purchase fresh curry leaves, let alone so many different lentils, and now we have access to this incredible resource. Totally dreamy. Lucky us. 

Singla also published an Indian slow cooker cookbook that is worth the time to track down. I had a copy but lent it to someone, and I forget who that was. If anyone knows who has my copy of this cookbook, please let them know I would like it back.

The soup: Gazpacho
The book: Snacks for Dinner (2022) by Lucas Volger

We might be at the tail end of gazpacho season here in the dregs of summer, but I think this is a recipe to keep handy for next time tomatoes are coming in. Gazpacho is a cold soup made primarily from tomatoes and other summer vegetables. This recipe stood out to me because it also calls for watermelon, resulting in the most refreshing and flavorful gazpacho I have ever tasted. Plus, with a title like Snacks for Dinner, who wouldn’t be moved to try out some of these fantastic recipes? I liked the book so much I bought my own copy to keep at home. 

The book: Cook’s Illustrated Revolutionary Recipes (2018)
The soup: Pasta e Fagioli

Soup is peasant food. If I were alive during feudal times I would for sure have been a peasant. This does not mean the food was bad, it meant the food was simple. Pasta e fagioli, or pasta and beans, depending on one’s mother tongue, checks all my peasant-hearted soup boxes. It is made of common ingredients, it comes together quickly, and it is so comforting and tasty. Plus, it gets finished with grated parmesan and a drizzle of olive oil. Please and thank you. I’ll crawl into a big bowl as soon as the snow starts flying, so hopefully not TOO too soon. 

Any Cook’s Illustrated, America’s Test Kitchen, or Cook’s Country cookbook is worth the time to peruse. This group of related publications has been cranking out top-tier cookbooks for decades now. I like the Revolutionary Recipes book because it is essentially a repository for the best recipes to appear in the magazine counterpart. The recipes might get slightly fiddly because they are highly researched and tested, but this means they are also quite foolproof. These cookbooks are wildly popular, so they will be available in most library collections for years and years. 

The soup: Ramen
The book: Let’s Make Ramen (2019) by Hugh Amano and Sarah Becan

This hand-illustrated guide to creating ramen at home is such a joy to read. The graphic-novel quality of the drawings paired with great ideas and recipes for various ramen elements demystified the hows and whys I had about ramen-making. While I am still a big fan of the $0.25 Maruchan packets and their reliable saltiness and versatility, it’s nice to have an idea of how to level up ramen into a dish I would be happy to serve company. Making ramen is a great way to explore ingredients commonly used in Japanese cooking, and how they might be incorporated into regular rotation in the kitchen and pantry. Any cookbook that broadens the possibilities of my home cooking is the kind of cookbook I want to use. 

The soup: Chicken Stock
The book: Make it Ahead (2014) by Ina Garten

Barefoot Contessa alert! Ina’s Food Network show is one of my all-time comfort shows. Her gorgeous house, kitchen, and garden in the Hamptons provide hours of idle daydream fodder, and her adorable husband Jeffrey is away for work all week. What bliss. Ina’s recipes tend to be of a classic variety, but updated for modern palettes and kitchens. Her process for making chicken stock always knocks me out. She puts a whole five pound chicken in the pot with all the aromatics and simmers it for a million years, resulting in gorgeous golden stock that turns gelatinous after straining and refrigeration. I usually prefer to save scraps for stock-making, or to make soup that creates the stock as the recipe is followed. Store bought is fine, too.

However, when I need to make a super clean and tasty stock, this is my go-to. This recipe appears in all of Ina’s cookbooks, of which there are like a dozen or more. The books are always beautifully produced, and tend to contain recipes that one will actually use again and again.  

What’s your favorite soup to eat? Or to cook? Do you have any deep indelible memories involving soup? I have several. One of my best memories ever is this time my friends and I were out all day one fall. We were still in high school. It was chilly and bright out. We went to my house and my mother had just finished making a big pot of chicken soup, and that bread you bake in a coffee can. The sun was streaming into the kitchen and everything smelled good. She fed us like we were all her daughters, and we were all sisters. That’s what it felt like then. I still know those women, and we still remember that day, and that soup. 

Still feeling unmoved by the idea of soup for din-din? No worries, we can hook you up with a cookbook suited to any particular taste, and we’ll have fun doing so, too. Consider using Mead’s Your Next Five Books service for additional recommendations. This service is not limited to cookbooks, in the event that one is more interested in a different variety of books. Every book its reader, as they say. Happy reading and a very happy soup season to all.