Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Noodle Soup Book

Yesterday when I got to work, I had several important meetings, exams to grade, writing assignments to work on, but the obsession took hold of me. Noodle soups must become a book. Thank you anonymous commentator you requested it here! So I spent a few hours writing a proposal and sent it off to my agent. Fingers crossed.

The plan is to go global with it. The Asian family of soups is easily recognized. And so are the Italian. Oh tortellini in brodo. What you see here is actually leftover spaghetti soup. I mean it was spaghetti in sauce and I just added some broth. Really phenomenal with fresh tomatoes and parsley thrown in. Then of course there's chicken noodle soup and all its eastern European cousins. Spaetzele too I guess. Fideo soup in Spain.

But the question I have is what other cultures can be represented here? Are there whole other families of noodle soups I don't know of? I plan to exclude proper dumplings, but maybe I shouldn't. Are there South American, African noodle soups? Or from anywhere else?  There must be!    

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Soup dumplings! Where the soup is in the noodle, rather than vice versa! You have to include those, if only as a sidebar...

Elise Fleming/Alys K. said...

Don't omit dumplings! My mouth recalls the chicken and dumpling soup my German mother used to make. Some soups had large, light, fluffy dumplings and small, dense dumplings. Some fluffy ones had parsley in them... Oops! I'm salivating on the keyboard!

Janiek Kistemaker said...

All of Apicius' recipes for 'minutal' have 'tracta' crumbled into it near the end of the cooking, which must have been some kind of pasta.So you can start off with one of those....

Ken Albala said...

YES!! Janiek! You are absolutely right. I am including it!
Thanks.

Janiek Kistemaker said...

You're welcome. I'll be looking forward to your book.