One Of Each Soup

One Of Each Soup is from one of my favorite cookbooks: Cook & Tell by Karyl Bannister. The full title of the book is Cook & Tell: No-Fuss Recipes & Gourmet Surprises.

Full disclosure: My Great Recipes Collection is an Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a link and buy something (even if it’s not the particular book,) I receive a little compensation.

The cover also explains that Bannister is the creator of America’s favorite home-cooking newsletter – which ran for more than twenty years and 200 editions, and had readers across the country and around the world.

Hot Banana Soup

As the recipe title suggests, you’ll need one of each: apple, onion, banana, and potato.

BANANA?

Yes, and you’ll be adding a banana into this easy-peasy and flexible soup..and you’ll love it! The recipe is on page 14 of Cook & Tell.

This is one wonderful surprise, from the herb lady Marion Bates. Every time I look at the recipe, I don’t believe that banana. Then I make it, and I am a believer once more. It doesn’t matter what sizes of vegetables and fruits you use in the soup; expect the results to be a little different each time…

I couldn’t agree more. One time, I threw in some radishes, and extra potato, and ginger – then eliminated the suggested cream at the end of the recipe  – and it was still yummy.

Cook & Tell

I also regularly make the Curried Cole Slaw with Peanuts and Bacon on page 42. It’s a perfect summer salad and an interesting change from regular, boring cole slaw.

I tried Eleanor’s 1921 Lemon Sherbet with Hot Blueberry Sauce on page 198 some years ago, but the sherbet failed to set up sufficiently.  I ended up pouring the sherbet into ice cube trays and waiting for them to freeze sufficiently. I whipped up the Hot Blueberry Sauce, poured some over the frozen ice cube shaped sherbet and found lemon-blueberry heaven. Some day I should try that recipe again.

A really old picture of Eleanor’s 1921 Lemon Sherbet with Hot Blueberry Sauce.

Upon publication in 2001, Publisher’s Weekly wrote:

After sharing amateur family-style recipes for 20 years in a newsletter of the same title, Bannister compiles her favorites in book form, garnishing them with homey anecdotes, tips from the newsletter’s subscribers and her own appealing miniature illustrations. Many of the recipes are named for the subscribers who submitted them Betty’s Quick Coffee Cake, Angie’s Cold Broccoli giving the book a disarming sewing-circle feel. Bannister’s recipes are unremarkable, but quick and undemanding; they typically exhort the reader to not worry too much about technique. Some combine wholesome, fresh ingredients, but most make use of commercially prepared foods such as the canned vegetables or sauces easily found in mainstream grocery stores. Many of the recipes are classics, such as the Simple Shepherd’s Pie, Spareribs and Sauerkraut and Cranberry-Glazed Pork Roast. Desserts and baked goods are the strongest offerings, with some truly outstanding, like the Linzertorte, Trifle and Irish Oat Scones. Bannister’s paramount assumption is that quickly executing a hot meal for the family is the overriding demand on the average home cook; the success of many of these recipes thus relies on somewhat diminished expectations. The planned six-city author tour may help her overcome slumming cosmopolitans’ fear of canned goods.

And the reviewers on Amazon agree, calling the cookbook, “a homespun handbook for everyday cooks,” and “a cookbook with the flair and flow of a simple, unpretentious friend trying to get you excited about time spent in the kitchen.” I completely agree.

One Of Each Soup

Ready in less than an hour, this is one amazing soup that will surprise you every time. It’s easy to adapt with what’s in your fridge. The soup could also be served cool on a hot day. Effortlessly complex, endlessly versatile, highly forgiving. Make it tonight.