Crunch Time

One of my guests recently commented that, while he loved the green garlic soup, it needed to be crunchier. It’s one of those valuable bits of feedback worth their weight in, well, croutons.

Michael Ruhlman talks at length about the importance of garnishes in soups, going so far as to equate the toppings to the soup itself (see Twenty, chapter on soups). However, he notes, thick, pureed soups don’t really need much in the way of a garnish. Whoops. Got that one a bit wrong.

I actually had included what I thought was an ample plenty of homemade croutons with that green garlic soup. But obviously it wasn’t enough for my guest. Which leads me to my suggested refinement on the Ruhlman Rule: It’s (almost) impossible to go wrong with an added crunch to any soup on the planet.

The (vegan) soup pictured here is accompanied by croutons prepared in a jalapeno-infused olive oil. To say that it’s a refinement is a complete understatement: these croutons lift an already kick-ass soup into the stratosphere. In the non-vegan version, I put a handful of cajun-poached shrimp and seared mushrooms in for good measure, so the seasoning is already there. But even so, gotta have that crunch.

Which is interesting for me personally. Aside from the de rigeuer oyster crackers you found on the table along with what ever seafood stew the restaurant was preparing that night (crab, oyster, etc.), I don’t remember crunch being a part of my soupy youth. Or even adulthood for that matter. OK, there was the large blob of gruyere melted on a toasted slab of day-old bread on my absolute favorite french onion soup. But that’s not really a supplemental crunch but an integral part of the dish.

So from where n did this penchant for crunchy soups first start to enter southern cuisine? And when? Was it always there, and I simply didn’t notice (quite possibl)y? Or was it the result of some “invasive” cuisine (I’m thinking Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese foodways) that entered into the southern menu?

Aside from yet another example in an extensive list of lacunae in my food knowledge, the personal ignorance here is not to interesting. What is more interesting, at least to me, is just how dynamic and rapid food inclinations develop, take hold, and spread.