Newsletter

In the Absence of a Plan, We Will Make Soup

Soups, a cocktail experiment with mixed results, power-pop and a history book highlight another ACBN Friday

Scott Hines

15 Nov 2024 — 11 min read

The middle of November is a rough time of year.

We’ve reached the point in the calendar where we’ve flipped from Fall! (whimsical, delightful, hayrides) to FALL?? (perpetual darkness, wet leaves, various horrors). The sun is but a distant memory, the trees are increasingly bare, and the pumpkin-spice promise of the season has given way to the unpleasant reality of winter’s approach.

Given all that, I can’t really fault the folks who flipped the switch directly from Halloween to Christmas on November 1st, even if the presence of tinsel and twinkle lights with a full six weeks to go until the holiday is decidedly not my style.

What else are we to do with this drudgy point in the year?

I’ll tell you what.

We can make soup.

Like anyone with a borderline-parasocial relationship with their Dutch oven, I get amped up for the idea of soup almost as soon as summer ends. Heck, I made soup for the first Friday Newsletter of the fall this year. But this moment, right now, this awkward celestial alignment of bad weather, ennui and holiday anticipation? This is actual Soup Season.

It’s the perfect way to keep busy while we put our brains back together: it can be a fun wekeend project without being too daunting of one. It’s comfort food without being too indulgent ahead of Thanksgiving. It is a justification onto itself, and given the aforementioned Various Horrors of the world, we could do a lot worse than making soup this weekend.

The year is rapidly dwindling, and the holidays will be in full flush before you know it. Let’s take advantage of what might be one of the last normal weekends of the year.

It’s soup time.

This is not our first rodeo, of course.

I’ve published a bunch of soup recipes over the years here, and while I can’t precisely quantify this, they seem to be the most popular category of recipes for readers to actually make. They hit that sweet spot of effort and enjoyment, and I’m more than happy to deliver.

Last weekend, I spent a good chunk of time bringing my Recipe and Cocktail archives back up to speed—hundreds of entries pulled out of previous Friday Newsletters and organized for easy browsing.

(Heck, there’s so many in there, I’d forgotten about some of them.)

Here’s a few soups that have graced these pages before: