Sovay's Profile

From: Northern England,

Joined: October 7th, 2012

About me: I've embarked on a mission to cook something new from every cookery book I own - currently 260 - and am planning to use my account here to keep track (thanks to rfb from Librarything for tipping me off to the existence of this site). I've made a couple of rules for myself: to cook the recipe as given, with no substitution or variation unless suggested by the author; and to try to pick a genuinely new dish from each book - in other words, as I've cooked many Leek and Potato Soups in my time, I don't get to count Leek and Potato Soup as a new dish just because I haven't used this specific recipe before (unless it has really significant differences from the usual versions).

Hodge Podge from Mrs Beeton's Cookery Book

Beef and vegetable soup with beer - turned out disappointingly bland. The recipe had no seasoning other than salt and pepper - having tried it, I added a stock cube and some Worcester sauce, which helped... read more >

recipe reviews (241)
book reviews (5)
useful review votes (43)

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Sovay's Reviews

2 recipe(s) reviewed. Showing 1 to 2Sort by: Title | Date | Rating

The Moro Cookbook

By Samantha Clark, Samuel Clark, Pia Tryde
Ebury Press - 2003

This is my favourite recipe from this book though I only cook it in autumn because I think it's best with fresh chestnuts. I usually make it as a stew rather than a soup, leaving the ingredients in larger pieces and reducing the stock; I also omit the saffron because it's pretty much overpowered by the colours and flavours of the other ingredients.

Can be made even more substantial with the addition of chicken thighs and/or chick peas.

useful (0)  

Great flavours - mushrooms, sherry and toasted almonds - but I've taken off a star because I had some reservations about the texture. This was partly due to the dried mushrooms, though that could easily be solved by processing them to a puree after soaking. However the main issue was the almonds; I tried both suggested methods - processing and pestle-and-mortar - but still couldn't achieve a fine powder and so ended up with little almond chips in my soup. The recipe does say something like "grind them as fine as you can" which suggests to me that I'm not the only one who has a problem. I suppose one could use ready-ground almonds, but they would have less flavour to start with and I suspect would burn easily when toasted. It might be better simply to toast and roughly chop the whole almonds so that they provided a more deliberate crunch.

useful (0)