Stone Soup
Stone soup, Stanley Tucci, and eating notes
Hello! My name is Rebecca May Johnson, I am a writer and cook and this is my Substack. This week’s newsletter is about Stone Soup based on a Stanley Tucci Tiktok… with a recipe, and then eating notes.
Stone Soup
I recently watched a sort-of cooking video on TikTok where Stanley Tucci talks about a soup made from vegetables in water.
‘you rolling?.... Ok, so I made this afternoon some string bean minestra, which means soup in Italian, and basically it’s this incredibly easy thing that my grandmother and my mother always made and which I now make, which is, you take a little bit of garlic, a little piece of onion, potatoes, zucchine, fresh tomatoes and maybe a splotch of marinara and string beans and you throw them all into a pot and you don’t sauté anything or you don’t do anything like that – with some water, and you cook it down, and salt, and olive oil, and that’s what it looks like. It’s like a very light, light, soup but absolutely delicious. This with toasted bread, crunchy bread, so good, perfect lunch, perfect side dish. That’s my flight, I gotta go, bye.’
Stanley’s presentation is not particularly, appetising, he prods the pot with a spoon, it’s vegetables floating in liquid, but I had a powerful desire for it, thinking that it also gave me a way to use the zucchine from the allotment. I invited my friend Emily, who lives round the corner, to have it. I didn’t have any green beans, however, and Emily was going to the shops and offered to buy the beans, then I realised I had no tomatoes either, and thought that some basil would be a good addition. She came over with beans, the remains of a packet of vine tomatoes she had at home and basil that she had kindly washed and dried. I made the soup with some of what I had and with what Emily brought, and added chickpeas to the mix as it was going to be the main dish in a dinner for three of us.
The genesis of the soup reminded me of the folk tale Stone Soup in which some people arrive in a village with a stone and a pot and water but no other ingredients. The soup is made when they begin cooking the soup over a fire, and invite people to share it with them – if only they’ll bring a few ingredients. After having this conversation with a few villagers who each contribute a few bits – carrots, cabbage, etc, they end up with a delicious soup.
I invited Emily round for soup without having the ingredients to make it. Three of us ate it, me, Emily and Sam – and was so good, garnished with olive oil and parmesan and eaten with bread – and there was a little leftover for lunch the next day.
Ingredients
Serves 4
200g green beans, trimmed and cut into 1-inch lengths
3 small courgettes cut into 1cm sections; if they’re big, cut in half and scoop out spongey centre
5 medium size potatoes, peeled and cut into 2cm cubes
1 tin chickpeas + liquid
12 cherry tomatoes, halved
5 small garlic cloves (or fewer small ones), whole and peeled
½ onion, roughly diced
1 small dried chilli
a small bunch of fresh basil, leaves picked washed and dried
To serve
extra virgin olive oil
parmesan
bread
How to make
Put everything apart from the basil in the pot. Add water until it only just reaches the top of the ingredients. Simmer for 40 minutes until everything is tender. Season well with salt. Tear in the basil. Serve immediately with a drizzle of olive oil, parmesan and bread.
Eating Notes
Our friend Katherine visited from London and I was a bit under the weather so Sam did almost all the cooking. Notably, this sensational meal of meatballs - made from a mix of Italian sausage and beef with grated onion and breadcrumbs, browned then baked in tomato sauce with cheese on top, with little cubed potatoes roasted with olive oil, rosemary and garlic. A green salad, too.
My chief contribution to the weekend’s food was a blueberry custard tart. I wanted a french-type one with a pastry recipe, too. I didn’t find one in my recipe books, so looked it up online and found this one by Rick Stein. The pastry recipe worked really well and the the tart recipe itself was easy to follow. The double chilling of the pastry before baking meant there was no shrinkage. I would say it tasted even better on day two. Creme fraiche is a good accompaniment for bringing acidity. I didn’t have a metal tart dish with a removable base and used a ceramic tart dish instead, which worked fine and cooked the base perfectly.
The next day we went for a walk with a packed lunch with the best rolls ever, a delight provided by effective shopping: a roll filled with a slice of supermarket-made tortilla (heated up in a pan before being put into the roll), allioli (Chovi brand, which is ridiculously addictive and garlicky), roasted red peppers from a jar. We also had cherry tomatoes to eat, and some crisps.
I ordered scrambled egg and sausage on toast near where I live but they forgot the sausage and it took a long time to come, until after everything else had been eaten, so I was presented with a single sausage in (on?) a ramekin.
I am obsessed with my new Baggu lunch bag and I took it to the British Library with a cheddar and Branston pickle roll, a plum, a hot pepperami(!) and a buttered slice of Soreen malt loaf. Some childhood packed lunch classics.
Dinner for one of fish fingers, oven chips, peas, ketchup and tartare sauce.
New and Events
In the autumn I am going on tour with the UK paperback of Small Fires, which is published on the 1st of September with a bonus afterword and some extra recipes! The helpful people at Pushkin made this page with dates and links to tickets. I am really looking forward to visiting bookshops, having some great conversations, meeting people, and sharing my work!
A couple of events in the US are coming up later in the year, too. More on that soon…
My mother made a wonderful green bean soup. She added the herb lovage and then a spoon of sour cream to the individual serving bowl. Or you can just add vinegar. The soup looks like dish water but it is divine and was my childhood favorite. Our eyes may eat...but looks aren't everything!
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