It is the height of the tomato season and what a season it is!

My farmer’s market has a great selection of heirloom varieties and I’ve been delving into some of the interesting versions of Gazpacho. (We’ve featured Gazpacho before on Blue Cayenne– here and here and they are both wonderful recipes. See them pictured below.)

This recipe, a Melissa Clark recipe from her book Dinner in French, caught our attention because it features watermelon. The watermelon gives the Gazpacho a hint of sweetness and a very pretty color. We can’t recommend this recipe highly enough. 

Here is the recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen. 

This would be a delightful soup to serve on New Year’s Eve. 

It’s delicious. 

It’s beautiful.

The Roquefort cheese and butter mixture stirred into the soup at the list minute adds a subtle and unexpected flavor that should wow your guests on that special night.

It would definitely be a conversation starter.

After all, who expects to find  blue cheese in their soup, let alone a fine sheep milk blue from Southern France with, according to Smithsonian Magazine, a pedigree that dates back to at least 1411–the year when French King Charles VI of France officially gave the cheese the protection of the crown.

Here’s a bit of history. Charles VI was known as Charles The Beloved when he was young. He succeed to the throne at eleven. As he matured, however, things took a dark turn and “The Beloved” morphed into “The Mad” as Charles’ mental health deteriorated.  At times, he thought he was made of glass and would shatter if jostled. At other times, he ran wildly up and down the halls of his palace, a development that caused his aides to seal the palace doors. In battle, he attacked his own men. It was a difficult time for France and its troubled king during a particularly fraught period in French history as France struggled with England.

We’re figuring that the recognition of Roquefort cheese as a French treasure was done on one of Charles’ good days.

I first learned this recipe at the La Bonne Cuisine Cooking School then located just off Main Street in Seal Beach, California. Margaret, the proprietor, was a talented recipe developer. I fell in love with the tiny cooking school and attended many classes there. We learned everything from classical French dishes to regional Mexican ones.

Sadly, La Bonne Cuisine Cooking School is long closed and to my knowledge no similar cooking school operates locally. Fortunately, I still have a big notebook of Margaret’s recipes. Here is the original recipe handout from the school with all the scribbles of an eager cooking student (me!). It looks like I took that class in the summer of 1979–23 years ago. 

Wow! I HAVE been serving this soup for a long time. 

Here is Veloute de Roquefort as I prepared it in my kitchen. This soup deserves the best Roquefort cheese you can find. 

Could you use a steaming bowl of creamy rich soup about now? The world is having a heartbreakingly-bad week.

This recipe is adapted from Melissa Clark’s recipe on the NYT site. Here is a link to the original recipe: Lemony Carrot and Cauliflower Soup.