Cream soups part 1: introduction

Soup is one of the most basic foods there are, and yet it's so easy to mess it up. One of my favourite soups are cream soups. They are especially amazing during a cold winter day when it's raining or snowing outside and you don't have to do anything other than sit on the sofa watching television or reading a nice book (which happens to be a very common thing if you are a stay-at-home mum who lives in London).

There are many ways of making cream soups, some very French-technical, some more homely, some more expensive, some cheaper. I will try to cover them all.

What is a cream soup?

Technically a cream soup is a soup that:

• has a main flavouring ingredient
• has something to make it thick
• is blended (or pureed)
• has cream (or some substitute)

Most times we call cream soups to soups that don't actually have any cream (or cream substitute). Those should be called puree soups, but since they are siblings and on a daily basis we don't really make a difference, I'll cover both.

The same happens with soups that have cheese. We shouldn't really call them creams, but we do usually consider them to be in the same group, so I'll go through those as well.

I will probably be writing about 8 or 9 posts on all the different ways to prepare cream soups, I'll link them here as I post them.

The series:
Part 2: the starch method: using potatoes, rice or beans.

• Cream of cauliflower recipe

Part 3: the roux method: using butter (or oil) and flour.

• Cream of bell peppers recipe