IMPROVING SOUPS
OOOO LOE This is the text of a talk on health broadcast recently from ZB, YA
and YZ stations of the NZBS
by
DR
H. B.
TURBOTT
Deputy-
Director-General of Heaith
| N item that more or less dis- ) appears from our summer household menus will be ‘back again with the colder weather-soup! If soup kept its rightful place, as an appetiser to the main dish, all would be well. However, in the cold months, you often see a meal made in restaurants solely of a bowl of soup with toast, and a good many families enjoy a similar simple saving of a busy mother’s time, and make no complaint when soup is the kernel of the meal. Soup, then, has to be taken seriously. Nutritionists say it.doesn’t provide a good meal, it doesn't heat the body, and that for all the bother mother takes in making good bone stock, that stock has very little nutritional, value. Its function, they say, is to tickle up the palate, make the digestive juices flow, and so prepare the way for the solid part of the meal. They insist we’re not supposed to dine off an appetiser. There are ways of -getting around most difficulties. It is true that soup on ae ae
its own is not a good meai, tor tht simple reason you can’t eat enough to provide good calorie value. It is a filling dish for the time being only. It doesn’t heat the body more than in a temporary way, again because body heat comes from the calorie value, low in ordinary soup. It is true that your beautiful jelly-like bone stock has little nutritione! value. Its function is to give body and flavour to the final dish. What are we to do? Give up soup? No fear! Turn your soup into a richer dish. Tip in some more calories by adding sippets of fried bread, by using barley, rice, macaroni or vermicelli, by thickening with potato or oatmeal, and cramming it with available vegetables. Alternately, make a thick pea or lentil soup, a favourite with most families. All these soups are meant to be first course only. If you do wish occasionally to make a meal of soup alone, then add plenty of milk, either in the making or in the eating, to make it really worthwhile. Dried milk goes well in soup-making. There’s something else that improves the nutritional value of your soup, and that is your vegetable water. Ts. it thrown away in your household? I sup- | pose our commonest vegetable is the | cabbage, or silver beet. It doesn’t mat- | ter, really, what green vegetable you are using. When you shred it, and put about two cupfuls with another cupful of boiling water, and keep it boiling as most households do for twenty minutes, the liquid you strain off can be up to one half as rich in vitamin C as orange juice. Cooking vegetables to retain the maximum food value is a skill. If you use too much water in the cooking, that water collects about half of the vitamins B and C, about a half of the iron, and | about a third of the lime. What a lot | of good stuff to drairi away down the sink! To reduce this loss you use the
smallest possible amount of water for cooking, have it boiling and already salted, before adding the vegetables a little at a time to stop the water going off the boil. Instead of cooking for set times, cook until tender only. The fresher the vegetable the less likely are you to need all the cook-book time and the more time you can curtail in the cooking the more savings you make in food value. Cooking green vegetables nutritiously is undoubtedly a skill. Have a shot at it! And what you have lost into the very little water that will be left will all be saved and reach the body, if those vegetable drainings go into the soup or the gravy. You can’t do this profitably for flavour or food value if you are a soda fiend. Soda should be out for green vegetable cooking. In these cold months, when green vegetables are a big item in the budgef, cook them the skilful way. When having soup, enrich it as suggested, not forgetting that valuable vegetable water.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 786, 13 August 1954, Page 20
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726IMPROVING SOUPS New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 786, 13 August 1954, Page 20
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