Creamy Zucchini Soup Recipe

Soup is usually considered a first course: a liquid dish in which, alongside the other ingredients, liquid makes up at least half. Often it's hard to say exactly what kind of soup it is, because picking out the main component is tricky. That mostly applies to soups with many ingredients. Soups are normally named after their main flavor, such as meat soup with rice or vegetable soup with shrimp. Still, there are plenty of soups that are simple in composition but not always simple to make.

The base of most soups is broth. Of course, there are plenty of soups made with milk or other liquids, but soups on broth, or rather on a stock, are far more common. In French, the word for broth shares a root with a verb meaning “to boil”. Put simply, broth is a stock obtained by boiling certain ingredients. Vegetable, meat and fish broths all make an excellent base for soup.

What's more, in many cuisines of the world broths are served as dishes in their own right. You can hardly call broth highly nourishing, since it contains few nutrients. But broths are often used to keep up strength during weakness or illness, because they are easy to digest. At heart, ukha is a broth or fish stock with spices and herbs added. Vegetable stocks are most often made with roots: carrot, celery, onion, sometimes parsnip, parsley root and others. I read somewhere that there is even a broth made from seaweed.

When I was little, I loved looking at the pictures in an old cookbook. For some reason I remember the ones where rosy-cheeked children happily eat soup. Not ordinary soups with carrots, potatoes or a piece of meat in them, but soups that look more like semolina porridge. Even then I discovered cream soups and puréed soups: smooth and very tasty.

Often the cooking time of the main ingredients is much shorter than the time needed for the base, the broth. So it's more convenient to make the stock first and then cook the soup on top of it.

These days we regularly make such first courses at home. And the tastiest one we make is zucchini soup. Zucchini, a close relative of the pumpkin, grows well and needs little care. The fruits come in all kinds of colors. You often hear the name courgette or zucchini. In many European languages the word is pronounced “zucchini”, and it's generally taken to mean the green-fruited variety. But the point is the same: a zucchini stays a zucchini, even in zucchini caviar or sweet zucchini fritters. The remarkable thing about zucchini is their extremely low calorie content alongside a very high content of useful nutrients.