Are we bored with salads, are we in the mood for cooking yet, or is it still too hot to spend much time in the kitchen? Vegetables and fruit, with perhaps a little fish, are still the most appealing foods to eat when summer is still with us.
To think of soups as suitable only for winter would be to miss out on some wonderfully refreshing delicate summer dishes. Think of a cool, silky vichyssoise, smooth with potato, and with a gentle hint of leek. Think of it again, in a new guise, flavoured and lightly coloured with saffron. Imagine the bare hills and parched earth of an Andalucian summer, and then imagine a shady street in Cordoba, a dark doorway, a dim, cool interior, and a rough earthen-ware bowl, full of chilled, piquant gazpacho.
While there are countless soup recipes already in the international culinary repertoire, the imaginative cook can produce a range of individual and exciting soups from a vast array of ingredients. One might almost say that there is no foodstuff which cannot be used in soup: fruit and vegetables certainly; fish, meat and poultry; of course, pasta, pulses, rice, cheese, even bread and eggs can be used.
As with most things, what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. You cannot make good soup from poor ingredients. By poor, I do not mean inexpensive. I mean old, stale, spoilt.
Some of the best soups I have ever eaten have been made from the simplest of ingredients – fried garlic, day-old bread, water or broth, perhaps a handful of herbs, and a fresh egg. Such are the soups of the Iberian peninsula, the Portuguese sopa alentejana and the Spanish sopa de ajo.
Over the years, I have developed a range of fruit and vegetable soups, experimenting with many combinations – carrot and apple; carrot and mango: carrot and peach; fennel and apple; tomato and redcurrant; courgette and melon.
The most successful soups have been those where the fruit and vegetable are complementary rather than hugely contrasting in flavour. And, of course, the colours must be similar; otherwise, if you blend a green vegetable with a red fruit, you finish up with a very muddy-looking soup.
The best thing about these soups is that they are equally delicious hot or cold. Although they will need stirring before serving, they do not have a great tendency to separate. If you use a non-stick saucepan, there need be no oily surface to the soup. A vegetable stock or a very light chicken stock can be used. I prefer the former, as it does not mask the fresh flavour of the soup, as a meat stock might.
What is more, if the meat stock is too concentrated, a chilled soup may turn into a jellied one. Season the soup while hot but remember that chilling will reduce the flavour of the seasoning, so you may need to add before serving.
Chilled soups can have a spoonful of cream or yoghurt whisked into them before serving and look particularly good served in glass bowls, which have stood in the freezer for half an hour or so. The soup should definitely be served cold rather than tepid. Make it early in the day before the temperature climbs and refrigerate until required. Serve an antipasto before the soup, with an aperitif or two, and as a main course, fish fillets.
Not, of course, as impressive as the massive denċi our friends Joseph and Elsie Xuereb have cooked for us in their bread oven, individual fish fillets are, nevertheless, very quick to cook à la minute and easy to deal with, either in a grill pan or on a griddle for four to six servings, or baked in a hot oven on an oven tray for more servings.
This is how I cooked salmon fillets many years ago for a dinner for two dozen book trade reps when I had my very first book published. The dessert was summer pudding, and I still have the six large white Mason & Cash pudding basins; I have never needed as many since then.
Summer fish dishes might suggest prawn salads, cold poached salmon with cucumber, mayonnaise and new potatoes, or perhaps an aioli – a platter of cooked salt cod, eggs, potatoes, vegetables and a thick garlicky sauce. Good as they are, why not ring the changes by cooking fish with chillies and spices?
Chilli-hot food does indeed cool you down, so for my summer fish dish, I am going to brush salmon or denċi fillets with mild curry paste before grilling or roasting; or season with olive oil, then tequila and lime zest before cooking, and serve with sweet corn and tomatoes.