Cream of porcini soup

This looks like one of my mother's more recent recipes. Serves 4:

1 knob butter
1 finely chopped onion
500 g flat mushrooms (finely sliced)
50 g dried porcini (soaked)
4 bashed cloves garlic
1 glass white wine
1 l fresh chicken stock or tinned consommé diluted 50/50 with water
100 ml crème fraiche

Soak porcini in hot water until soft. Melt butter in large saucepan & add next 4 ingredients. Turn down heat & cover. Cook gently for 20 m. Add white wine & reduce by 1/2. Add stock & bring to boil. Simmer 10 m & add cream. Remove heat. Liquidise in small batches and return to clean pan. Season with salt and pepper.

Savoury mousse

Another source of material has emerged in the shape of my grandmother's battered red file of recipes, some typed, some handwritten. I dislike the title of the first recipe, "Cheese special" - but having sampled a few scrapings from the bowl in advance of a dinner party where this was the starter, can testify to its goodness.

Ingredients:

1 Philadelphia cheese
1 Boursin cheese with garlic
1 tin of C&B consommé - 8 oz
1 teaspoon Worcester sauce
4 oz single cream
Optional: a few prawns or shrimps
A little parsley

Method:

Put 3/4 of consommé into bleder.
Add both cheeses, Worcester sauce and cream.
Mix slowly if slightly lumpy or fast if smooth result required.
Pour into 5 or 6 ramekin dishes leaving 1/4 inch space at top.
Optional: add prawns/shrimps by hand before pouring into dishes.
Place in fridge for about 1/2 hour.
Remove from fridge and pour remaining consommé on top.
Return to fridge.

Serve:

Remove from fridge a few minutes before serving and sprinkle with a little parsley.

A very seventies dish which sounds potentially disgusting but is in fact rather good. Although I can certainly recall Granny making this as described above, I think my mother did something similar but without the consommé on top which she called "Snaffles mousse".

Chilled soup

I recently received a marketing e-mail from Waitrose which included the headline "An exclusive 25% off chilled soups". Below, it read: "Soup is the perfect comfort food to cheer up a chilly autumn day. That's why we're offering myWaitrose members 25% off all chilled soups until 7 October". Apart from the flawed logic, it is the misuse of "chilled" to which I object. Presumably, they are referring to soup which is served hot but sold from their refrigerators rather than in a tin or a packet. But to me "chilled soup" conjures up Gazpacho and Vichyssoise - perfect Summer soups but not, I suspect, what the marketeers had in mind. As a matter of fact, I'll happily eat Gazpacho all year round: and, in fairness to Waitrose, having criticised their use of language, they are the only supermarket in the land which sell Gazpacho (Alvalle is the brand) that bears any resemblance to what you can get in Spain.

My uncle Alex has a novel way if Gazpacho is ever on the menu at any dinner party he attends. He asks for it to be put in the microwave. Cold soup, in his view, is unacceptable.

In my mother's recipe book is a recipe for "Strawberry Gazpacho". I reproduce it below:

1/2 lb strawberries
1 teaspoon tabasco
1 tin beef consommé
1/4 pint orange juice
2 cucumbers
Salt and pepper
Blend in food processor.

I have not tried it, and must confess I would feel slightly wary about doing so. Beef consommé and orange juice? Hmmm.

There is a further recipe for another chilled soup on the same page:

Beetroot consommé

Boil pieces of raw beetroot, carrots, onions, potato and stock cube. Make up with one packet of Madeira aspic. Serve chilled with sour cream.