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.

She was so gifted a writer that W.H. Auden said of her: “I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose.”

She was so elegantly beautiful that the Dadaist artist Man Ray begged to photograph her, fascinated as he was by her striking bone structure.

She almost single-handedly invented the modern narrative genre of food writing and collected legions of admirers (and some fierce critics) along the way.

She was Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher– MFK Fisher to her readers.

Fisher was a cook, an “influencer” before that term was even imagined, a supremely-talented writer and an unrepentant free spirit. She wrote twenty-seven books, hundreds of stories for The New Yorker Magazine and countless articles in magazines like Vogue, Gourmet and The Atlantic. Among her most important works were her depression-era how-to-cope tome How to Cook A Wolf,  a translation of Brillat Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste (She was deeply influenced by years spent in France and by French cooking.), and The Art of Eating, a book Alice Waters says should be required reading for all cooks. Improbably, she also worked for Paramount Studios for a time writing gags for Bing Crosby and Bob Hope.

What made Fisher’s food writing so novel? She saw (and wrote about) food as a cultural metaphor.

In her personal essays, her writing ranged from the personal to the historical to just about every subject touching human existence. A “food piece” by Fisher was never just a food piece. She explained her wide grasp for subject matter in The Art of Eating: “It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it…and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied…and it is all one.”

Fisher called minestrone, for example: “Probably the most satisfying soup in the world for people who are hungry, as well as for those who are tired or worried or cross or in debt or in a moderate amount of pain or in love or in robust health or in any kind of business huggermuggery, is minestrone.”

So…that’s you and me and everyone else. Right?

We need minestrone. Today. Now. Whenever.

So… here is a recipe for an early summer minestrone–a very good one–  adapted from The Complete Italian Vegetarian Cookbook by Jack Bishop. No huggermuggery here.

This recipe is adapted from The Complete Italian Vegetarian Cookbook by Jack Bishop. The book is old–1997–but it is still available at a price. You can find it at used bookstores and on Amazon here.