The Pleasure of a Chilled Soup on a Sweltering Day
(This is also a New York and Jewish story, so I'll cross-post.)
'Back when it used to snow in winter and bloom in spring, and when the dog days of summer came reliably in August and not weirdly in April or June, I used to drink ice-cold schav to keep from falling completely apart. In those days, we languished in our East Village or Hell’s Kitchen railroad apartments — the kind with floors that sloped and a tub in the kitchen from which you could reach a wet hand out of the morning shower to turn off the gas under the hissing pot of Café Bustelo. You’d throw your key down in a balled-up tube sock to friends below on the sidewalk — because the buzzer never worked — and you’d sit out on the fire escape at night to try to stay cool.
In that kind of sweltering heat — which here in ruthless New York automatically came with the added affronts of suffocating humidity, truck grit, broken glass, screeching subway cars and the stench of some unexplained three-day stretch without garbage pickup — a cold beverage was hardly enough. You’re not just hot; you’re blunted. Stupid. Gummy. Cold beer, cold soda, cold water may all do their parts to keep you hydrated but do next to nothing for your compromised faculties, leaving you wide open and vulnerable to, say, surrendering upward of 40 bucks, in $5 increments, to the three-card-monte guys who used to run their scams off flattened cardboard boxes topping milk crates on 14th Street, before broken-windows policing was even a thing.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/magazine/the-pleasure-of-a-chilled-soup-on-a-sweltering-day.html?
Ice-Cold Schav
4 tablespoons butter
1 medium shallot, peeled and finely minced
1 large russet potato, peeled and trimmed into the shape of a rectangular box, then small-diced. Mince the scraps from boxing as fine as the shallots
Kosher salt
3 cups water
½ pound sorrel, stems removed but saved, leaves washed and cut into 1-inch ribbons
4 hard-boiled eggs
Melt butter in nonreactive soup pot. Sweat shallot and minced potato scraps in the butter slowly, stirring gently. Season with salt.
Put diced potatoes in the water, season with salt and bring to a boil. Simmer potatoes until perfectly cooked, a couple of minutes only. Taste one cube to determine.
Add sorrel to sweating shallot-potato mixture, and season with salt. Stir and wilt the sorrel, which will happen almost instantly, turning drab immediately.
Add the cooked potatoes and their salty water to the pot of sorrel. Season with salt, if needed, keeping in mind that when chilled, the flavors are dulled significantly.
Chill immediately and thoroughly — overnight even.
Chop the hard-boiled eggs, and scatter in the cold soup. Mince half the reserved stems from the sorrel as you would chives, and sprinkle over soup.
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1018801-ice-cold-schav
