What Chefs Eat: A Not-So-Ordinary Krupnik

photo by author

For dinner, I often serve soup (not sure if it’s a German or only our Center, thing to have soup for dinner), which, to my surprise, has been a huge hit with my guests. It’s an ordinary krupnik, or grain soup. Well, not quite so ordinary. After all, Polish cuisine is all about soups, and no other cuisine in the world boasts such a variety of excellent soups as Polish cuisine does. And krupnik is not just a dish of Polish cuisine but a piece of Polish folk history.

Soups are among the oldest dishes in human history. Once we learned how to make containers and boil water, nothing was easier than tossing whatever was on hand into the pot, boiling it, and seeing what came out.

The most intriguing thing for me, and something that may forever remain a mystery, is how the idea of cooking inedible things like certain roots or plants came to mind. Take potatoes, for instance — how did someone first decide to throw them into boiling water and eat them? Add some grass, some mushrooms, and you’ve got soup. Perhaps even tripe!

Some researchers believe that Neanderthals were making soup over 30,000 years ago. This theory was proposed about ten years ago by John Speth, an archaeologist from the University of Michigan. He suggested that Neanderthals, who didn’t have clay pots, boiled water in leather bags and birch bark containers. While cooking with flammable materials might sound strange, there’s a simple physical principle at work: water boils at a much lower temperature than these materials ignite. As long as there’s water in the pot, it won’t heat beyond 100°C.

This theory about Neanderthals cooking food is supported by a 2011 study published in “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”. It found evidence of cooked starch grains in the 46,000-year-old fossilized jawbones of Neanderthals from Iraq. “This doesn’t prove that they made soups or stews, but I’d say it’s quite likely” commented Speth.

About 20,000 years ago (much earlier than previously thought), the Chinese invented pottery, likely to make soup. However, definitive evidence of soup-making appeared around 5,000 years ago.

But of course, this is also a simplification. Back then, not only was there no internet or cooking shows on TV but also no telephones (not even landlines) or carrier pigeons. What was familiar, every day, and obvious in one part of the world was something extraordinary, unknown, and mysterious in another, sometimes not even that far away.

This, after all, was a normal situation throughout most of human history. In the 12th century, the Mongols invading Europe struck fear with their dragon-shaped kites shooting sparks, and the noise and explosions of primitive gunpowder rockets. Less than a hundred years ago, the inhabitants of islands in the Pacific mistook American airplanes for the ships of gods delivering food and all kinds of goods, which gave rise to the cargo cults.

Our current reality, where someone can write something in a forest in Lower Saxony, Germany, and someone thousands of kilometers away can read it almost instantly, is an anomaly.

This is why soup was likely invented multiple times in different corners of the world over thousands of years.

Due to its simplicity, ease of preparation, and minimal equipment requirements (all you needed was a pot and maybe a knife to cut larger pieces before tossing them into the pot), soup became a popular and essential food for the poor. It was also important that you could cook soup while doing other tasks, unlike, for example, frying pancakes. Similarly, bread is a type of food where most of the work is done by time.

You could throw everything into a pot of water and return to, say, drawing a ritual image of a mammoth on a cave wall. Or picking fleas.

Groats, like soups, are among the oldest culinary inventions, eaten as far back as 10,000 years ago. In Poland, for sure, since the early Middle Ages. And they have always been a peasant food, the food of the poor.

Krupnik (barley soup) was most often made with barley groats, but there’s no reason not to use millet, which was just as popular in medieval Poland as barley. Peasant cuisine, the food of the poor, was made from whatever was on hand at the time.

Spices like pepper were once expensive and came from distant, almost mythical lands for the average European. However, local herbs and mushrooms were readily available. I didn’t have mushrooms this time, but they’d fit perfectly in a krupnik — dried, fresh, or frozen.

In folk cuisine, spices and oil were used to add flavor to thin, meatless soups. Dried mushrooms, rich in umami, were a great addition, as were sun-dried tomatoes, full of umami, similar to the Italian “cucina povera”.

Krupnik is one of the dishes I make regularly here, always without a set recipe, as I cook it only for guests and never have time to write down exact proportions. For instance, which herbs to use? I love coriander, but traditional parsley or fresh thyme are just as good.

When making soups, I follow a basic pattern. I start by frying onions, sliced into feathers, in oil, and adding the spices near the end of frying (a technique from Asian cuisine that boosts the flavor). Then I add a mix of root vegetables — two parts carrots to one part celery and parsnips (I use parsnip instead of parsley root). Next comes the broth, which simmered for four hours that morning, according to my recipe A-MA-ZING!

Sweet potatoes and millet are next. I add just enough to make the soup thick as the grains cook. Then I add oat milk to achieve the desired consistency, adjust the seasoning, and finish with chopped coriander before taking it off the heat. Sweet potatoes replace regular potatoes here — I love the depth and sweetness they add to soups. You could substitute millet with traditional barley, buckwheat, or even quinoa.

This is a bit of a “luxury” take on folk cuisine since it includes sweet potatoes and the soup is made with broth and oat milk, making it more expensive, but it’s worth the result. It’s the perfect thing to enjoy after a long day in the kitchen.

And because I always crave something different than what I cook for my guests, I pair the soup with something unusual: a “Brotaufstrich” (a popular German sandwich spread). My current favorite is from Vemondo, Lidl’s vegan line, with agave and mustard — excellent. Bear’s garlic, though, was disappointing.

Soups are one of the few things I can eat after a day of cooking, and they’re a bit of comfort food for me. Krupnik, tomato soup, and borscht are the tastes of my childhood, just like juicy ripe tomatoes and fresh cucumbers with salt. And don’t forget homemade mayo, of course, plant-based, made with aquafaba.

Another soup I make regularly is one based on vegetable juice, and each time it’s a little different. It’s truly a work in progress. In the latest version, like in krupnik, I started with sautéed onions, then added green peas and rice. The base was two-thirds vegetable juice and one-third broth, seasoned primarily with smoked salt and smoked paprika. I also added cumin, ground juniper, and ground nutmeg.

Instead of rice, sweet potatoes work well, and you could also add fried tofu pieces or chickpeas as a protein source instead of peas. Soups are a great way to use up small amounts of ingredients you have left over. What I call “the chef’s soup” is a pot of vegetables that need to be used, thrown together, and well-seasoned.

I’d bet my cashews against your sunflower seeds that this is how the famous minestrone or Tibetan thukpa soup came to be. In fact, I’m about to make thukpa following a recipe from a top chef in Mumbai, which I’ll be preparing for a special guest today.