“The Foraging Angler” column was initially launched with the idea of recommending places to dine when on a fishing trip in California. Our now retired columnist, Trent Pridemore, expanded this mission with recipes and cooking tips for when one is camping. For the next few issues, largely in response to the Covid pandemic, we’re shifting away from restaurant advice and focusing instead on ideas for food and beverages for you to pack in your fishing vest for by-the-water consumption or to keep in your cooler for when you return to your vehicle.
If you fish during the cold-weather days of winter, your pleasure from the experience can be enhanced by bringing food and drink that will help keep the chill away. A thermos of hot chocolate, or coffee or tea, can serve this purpose, but so does a thermos of soup, which can also have the heft to serve as a satisfying lunch beside the water. In winter, hot soup is comfort food of the first order, and on a steelhead stream or frigid lake, a thermos of it can save a fishless day.
I’m a fan of Sam Sifton’s no-recipe recipes on the New York Times “NYT Cooking” website — ideas for combinations of ingredients where the proportions are up to you, and you can make substitutions as inspiration strikes or as determined by what you have on hand in the pantry and the fridge. It’s the ultimate pandemic cuisine.
Soup is the quintessential no-recipe food: good things in a warm liquid, with all kinds of permutations and combinations possible. Hearty winter soups can get substance and protein from beans or other legumes, and beans form a good base for improvisation. Here’s a no-recipe recipe for a Mediterranean-style soup. I just call it “soup.” You can take it to the stream, warm it up in a rented cabin near the river, or just enjoy it at home while hunkering down, dreaming of Opening Day and waiting for better times. It includes an ingredient that can add a whole new dimension to many soups.
“Soup”
Most of the ingredients in this soup can be substituted for or omitted. It includes meat, but can be made in ways either vegetarian or full vegan.
Heat some olive oil in a large pot or Dutch oven. I add red pepper flakes to the oil to toast them, because I like a touch of heat, and Lidia Bastianich adds them, and that’s good enough for me. You could also use another spice — I recently discovered Aleppo pepper, and paprika, smoked or sweet, also works, taking the soup in a Central European direction. (Serve with a schlag of sour cream at the end.) If you want to add tomatoes later and want to punch up the tomato vibe, you can also add some tomato paste and, also like Lidia, toast it in the olive oil, too. If you’re using meat, add it now to brown and render. Pork, if you eat it, famously goes well with beans. Sometimes I use a third or half a pound of diced pancetta. I can find it already diced in the supermarket. Hot or sweet Italian sausage is great, taken from its casings and crumbled or bought in bulk. Both ground pork and “meatloaf mix” (ground pork, beef, and veal) also are great. I’ve never tried using just plain beef, but beef, ground or in chunks, as well as ground turkey or chicken, could work, too.
Add chopped onion and finely chopped garlic. I add a lot of garlic — as much as a full head. It mellows in the broth, and as the somewhat equivocal title of Les Blanc’s documentary says, garlic is as good as ten mothers. You could use less, or, perish the thought, none, but that’s just wrong. When chopping the onion and other veggies, go for a size that will fit in a spoon, but will retain some presence and texture.
More vegetables go in next. A russet potato, diced, will shed some of its starch as it cooks and thicken the soup a bit. In the summer, zucchini chunks break down in the soup after cooking and do the same, but we’re cooking a winter soup here. Cabbage is the king of winter greens and has an earthy sweetness. It also takes a while to cook, so while I add more delicate leafy greens later in the process, if I’m using cabbage, I add it now, chopped in spoon-friendly chunks.
Cover the pot and let all this cook down a bit. Then uncover and add a 14.5-ounce can of crushed tomatoes and their liquid. Add two 15.5-ounce or 19-ounce cans of cannellini beans, depending on how beany you want the soup to be. Garbanzos also work, taking things in a North African direction. In fact, pretty much any bean can go in here, in any amount. Yes, culinary virtue dictates beginning with dried beans, but I’m being realistic — and lazy.
Now add enough liquid to more than cover. This is a soup, although it’s basically a loose stew. You could use water, but I prefer unsalted chicken stock. It adds flavor and savor. One 32-ounce box, more or less, should do it. You’ll probably need to add some more to leftovers — I always do. I go for unsalted chicken stock because I’m a geezer and need to keep my cardiologist happy, but also because I prefer to control seasonings myself as much as possible, and there’s already a lot of salt in things such as pancetta, sausage, and canned beans and canned tomatoes. I add salt and pepper in each of the major steps here, but I go easy on the salt and adjust the seasoning at the end.
And the end is in sight. Bring the soup to a simmer. This is when I add any delicate, leafy greens, if I’m using them. Usually, if I already have cabbage in the soup, I don’t, but cabbage plus broccoli rabe, blanched, drained, chopped, and added at this point, go great together if there’s Italian sausage in the soup — sweet plays against bitter against the pork. Swiss chard leaves, torn from the stem and chopped, are a classic choice (save the stems, parboil them, sauté them in olive oil with garlic, and serve with a squeeze of lemon as a veggie some other time), as is escarole. Even lettuce can work. (Ever had lettuce fried with bacon?) Let these wilt into the soup.
Add a couple of bay leaves (to be removed before serving) and an herb or two, fresh or dried. I usually just go with dried oregano, but fresh rosemary adds bite, while fresh basil says “Hi” to the tomatoes (if you used them) in a different voice. Sage, pork, and beans also play well together.
Now for the secret ingredient: Parmesan rind. Yes, the hard cheese rind that’s left when you’ve finished grating genuine Parmigiano-Reggiano (or Grana Padano) actually can take a soup — almost any soup — to a whole new level. If you don’t already spring for the real Italian grana (I get that it’s more expensive than the American supermarket “Parmesans”), here’s another reason besides the incomparable taste of the real thing to do so. Save the rinds in the fridge, sealed in plastic wrap. They also freeze well.
Simmer the soup with the Parmesan rind buried in it for about half an hour, then remove and discard the rind, along with the bay leaves. The rind will have given up a subtle creaminess, and the broth will have taken on a mellow overtone from the cheese that gives it both body and complexity not achieved in any other way.
You might be tempted to add some kind of pasta to the soup here at the end, and that will work if you’ll be finishing the whole pot in one sitting, but in leftovers, the pasta will suck up all the broth and revert to paste. Not good.
Check the seasonings (a squeeze of lemon juice can brighten things) and serve either alone or over toasted bread slices rubbed with a garlic clove and drizzled with olive oil. Grated cheese — Parmesan, Pecorino Romano, Swiss, or gruyère — gilds the lily, and a glass of straightforward red wine completes the meal. It’s winter fuel.
Streamside-Friendly Version
You can take this table-ready no-recipe soup to the river in a wide-mouth thermos as is (prep the thermos first by filling it with boiling water, then emptying it), but if packing a spoon to eat it with is a bridge too far for you, here’s a stripped-down, meatless, sippable version. Sweat some chopped onion, garlic, red pepper flakes (if you wish), and chopped fresh rosemary leaves in olive oil. Add a can of diced tomatoes and their juice, two cans of cannellini beans, unsalted chicken stock, salt and pepper, and two bay leaves. Bring to a simmer and add a Parmesan rind.
Simmer for about half an hour, remove the rind and the bay leaves, and puree the soup in a blender, in batches, if necessary. (Don’t overfill the blender and risk redecorating the kitchen with hot soup.) Return it to the stove, reheat it, and thin it with more stock to the desired consistency — or with cream, if you want to be really decadent. At home, you can serve this with garlic croutons, a drizzle of olive oil, and grated Parmesan, but it’s good right out of the thermos on a cold day.
If ever there was a time for comfort food, this winter is it. As the old bluegrass song put it,
Pick away on the old banjo
Keep that guitar strumming
Put more water in the soup
There’s better times a-coming.
More Good Food and Drink for Winter Fishing
By Richard Anderson
When I was a kid, my father would take my brother, sister, and me up to Dodge Ridge in the central Sierra to ski. He invariably would seek interesting terrain, leaving the three of us to fend for ourselves on the bunny hill. Around noon, though, we would all gather for a group meal, which usually involved splitpea soup that Dad would pour hot from a thermos. I loved that soup from my first spoonful, and even now, decades distant from my initial experience, I’ll still cook up pots of it during winter. If you dice the soup’s onions and carrots and ham small enough, you don’t even need a spoon to eat it.
One thing I learned early, though, is that soup is not necessarily a thirst quencher. Depending upon ingredients and salt level, soup can accentuate thirst. (This is why making your own soup is usually wiser than buying canned products, which often have high sodium levels.) Always bring an additional beverage to keep yourself hydrated. Water is an obvious choice, of course. For other ideas, I turned to my small and ancient ski-touring library. Wilderness Skiing (1972), by Lito Tejada-Flores and Allen Steck, note that “Powdered fruit juice and fruit-flavored instant iced tea are often easier to drink than water.” David Beck, in Ski Tours in California (1972), observes that “Cold air is dry; be sure to drink at least two quarts of liquid a day,” and goes on to recommend “Hot chocolate, tea, coffee, and hot Jell-O [!] are good winter beverages.” And online are suggestions to drink hot Gatorade, using its powered rather than bottled form. The obvious plus here is that Gatorade provides electrolytes to help keep your body functioning well.
Also online was the caution that caffeine (found in coffee, tea, some soft drinks, and even some herbal teas such as green tea) has a diuretic effect and encourages water loss. Your goal, in addition to staying warm, is to remain adequately hydrated, and the best way to tell whether you are adequately hydrated is if your pee is colorless. Alcohol, by the way, can cause your body temperature to drop. Wait until after you’ve fished to treat yourself to a hot toddy or other adult beverage.
