The perfect lunch, for me, is a nice hot bowl of soup. Fortunately, my wife’s notebook is filled with recipes for scrumptious soups. Her fish chowder, among those who have dined at Chez Van Veen, is legendary, and I have already blogged about her crab bisque. She also makes soups that defy naming but that are heavy on onions and mushrooms and mysterious spices. Scraps from dinners past often wind up in Jill’s soupy concoctions, and the results are always delicious.
All this is a blessing to me. Others not so fortunate must rely on the likes of Campbell, which was once considered the gold standard of soups but which has lately decided to mail it in, depending on the familiar red and white can to keep the flywheel running, even though the product itself is tasteless at best and virtually inedible at worst.
The other day, with Jill out shopping, I was forced to search the cupboard for a can of soup. There were three choices: Cream of Mushroom, Curly Noodles, and Split Pea with Ham. I chose the pea soup, opened the can, and found a cementitious mass of sickly green – something. With some effort, I pried it out, shoveled it into a pan, and added a canful of water. The instruction suggested that I whisk the stuff now sitting in the pan. Whisk? What I needed was a jackhammer.
Eventually the green mixture was liquefied enough to heat, and I had my lunch. It was awful. I am sure the cream of mushroom and the curly noodles would have been as bad, for Campbell just doesn’t care any more.
Then why, you ask, do we even have it on the shelf? One reason is to serve in emergencies. (We also have some Spam stored in the cellar.) Reason two is that the others (Progresso, the house brands, etc.) are no better. Campbell makes some higher-priced, “Select” soups, and some of these aren’t bad. I suspect that the plan is to offer tasteless soups in the red and white cans to force customers to upgrade to the premium brand.
One of the delights on cruise ships is the assortment of creative soups on the menu. These include a number of chilled soups, often fruit-based (e.g., pear and ginger, blueberry-banana). No split pea and ham slime here; the ships’ chefs have flair, something wholly lacking in the Halls of Campbell. The cruise fare will also include a zesty French onion soup under a heavy matting of mixed cheeses. We have noticed a slight slippage in the over-all quality of cruise-ship food in recent years, but in soups, they’re still at the top of their game.
In a free-market economy, you’d expect some entrepreneur to rush to fill the vacuum left by Campbell and the other soup heavyweights. The situation cries out for someone to do for soups what Starbucks has done for coffee. It would not necessarily require exotic, expensive makings. Just a dash of imagination is all.
