From the kitchen of a captious vegetarian

When I was growing up my mom would often make a vegan version of vichyssoise. It was a simple soup made with unpeeled potatoes from her garden, leeks and onions, olive oil, salt and pepper. I always enjoyed it, even without the typical additions of butter, cream, and chicken broth. I ate vichyssoise both cold and warm, and only found out last weekend that the name vichyssoise actually refers only to the cold soup. Warm potato leek soup apparently is given a different name.

After seeing nice-looking leeks in the Saarbruecken market last week, I thought it would be nice to make a spring vichyssoise as one course in our Saturday night dinner party. Although the leeks looked good, all the potatoes in the market appeared to be from last fall; they were all shriveled and starting to sprout. My friends Spoons and Kathy suggested I use celeriac instead, since the celeriac looked very fresh. I was hesistant, as I thought that celery root would be a very strong flavor to replace the normally quite mild, earthy potatoes. But they insisted that celeriac can be used anywhere you use potatoes. (I have no idea where the celeriac or the leeks were from, but assumed they weren’t local to Germany in early May)

I was cooking for 12, and chopped up such a large amount of leeks and onions that they ended up steaming rather than sauteeing. It didn’t help that I used a tall narrow soup pot rather than a wide shallow pan. I didn’t have any vegetable broth so used veggie bouillon cubes, and we didn’t have butter but did add cream. Surprisingly, I couldn’t really taste the celery root. I definitely missed the earthy potato flavor, and the texture of the potato skins, but I don’t think I would have known there was celery root in it if I hadn’t seen it go in. I think adding the bouillon was a mistake, however. The flavor of vichyssoise is so delicate that the bouillon I used muddied it up and added too much of a dark base note. I prefer to get the base note from the potatoes. I also prefer vichyssoise without cream, I think, more like my mom used to make it. Either the cream or bouillon cubes or both gave a subtle but unpleasant greasy taste to the soup. I did really enjoy the fresh chives which Kathy used as a garnish. If we had had enough I think I would have added 2 Tbs. of chives to my one bowl of soup!

A word about salt: I thought that with the boullion cubes and a little added salt that the soup was seasoned just fine, but everyone else disagreed. Once some cream was added, however, the soup tasted much less salty and I let my guests add more salt. Cook’s Illustrated also notes that cold food needs more seasoning than hot food, since chilling dulls flavors.

The cookbook Second Helpings from Union Square has a recipe for lemongrass vichysoisse that I adored the first time I’ve made it. I’ve tried to recreate the dish multiple times since that first revelation, always taking various short cuts, and never quite getting the same bright lemongrass flavor, at least not without lots of stringy lemongrass bits. It might be that the only way to get the proper results is to go through the tedious steps (including the extremely fine chopping and sieving steps) described in the original recipe. I tried adding some commercially jarred lemongrass paste to the celeriac vichyssoise described above, and although I could taste the lemongrass, it was not the bright, fresh, lemon flavor I was looking for. I’ve thought about trying to use lemon but I’m afraid the juice is too acidic and the zest too metallic tasting.

After using celeriac and lemongrass in “vichyssoise” I looked around on the web for other variations and found recipes that use fennel, watercress, zucchini and saffron, just to name a few. Apparently this recipe is amenable to creativity.