Diana Henry's soup ideas to bowl you over

Something happened to my cooking in October. What I wanted to eat changed almost overnight. I started to cook dishes from way back – lentil soup made with ham stock; my Granny Millar’s beef shin and greens soup; vegetable soup from the basics in the fridge (leeks, celery and carrots), the ratios dictated by availability. 

I made stock as if someone had just told me about it. I was often in the kitchen at midnight pouring golden liquid through a sieve into a clean pan, delighted by the shimmer of fat on its surface.

Cooking for me has always been about going places through food, about eating the flavours of someone else’s childhood and getting my hands on unusual ingredients, but I didn’t do anything unusual to these dishes. 

I didn’t add caraway to the lentil soup to give it a Germanic flavour, or cumin and harissa to make it a little Moroccan. I wanted what I was cooking to be as plain as possible, not for convenience – though I was glad not to be rifling through the cupboards looking for spices – but because I wanted to coax flavour out of basics. That is how I started cooking and what I grew up with. Friends said it was a desire for comfort. 

We all talk about ‘comfort food’ and usually see it as a bowl of sticky toffee pudding or crumble. We want these because they’re sweet. I didn’t want something as simple as a sugar rush. What I was craving was more complex. The change definitely had to do with where we find ourselves, with rocketing energy bills, a cost of living crisis and a brutal war in Ukraine. It has felt as if things are collapsing. 

I posted some of my soups on Instagram, musing about what was going on with me. It was as if I’d let go of decades of cooking the world, senses alert, and had become a dog, sniffing the ground, looking for a safe place. One astute follower said, ‘Reality has burst in.’ It did feel as if I was feeding my family rather than making ‘interesting’ food. 

As I chopped an onion in the evening I was anchoring myself by doing something essential in a messy world. Sometimes I would look up and not recognise my own kitchen. I was with my granny, Sadie, as she carefully counted out the coins for her shin of beef, sliding them across the counter to the butcher, always anxious that she wouldn’t have enough, even though we’d counted it out at home. 

Shin was a treat because it wasn’t mince, which meant its purchase was weighty. Back in her house, the warmth of the beef cooking filled the kitchen. We stayed in there because it was the cosiest room, even though the heat made condensation run down the windows.

Some dishes are anchors even if you haven’t made them for years. It’s not that they take you back to a happy place – I was an anxious child and a depressed teenager – but they are fundamentals and emblems of constancy. I was on a rope bridge that was forever swaying but sometimes, when I was eating soup – warm, grounding – I could take my eye off the drop below.

The dishes here are anchors for me as I grew up with them; only the pumpkin one feels ‘recent’ and I’ve been making that for over 30 years. They might be new to you so won’t come with the same connections. But I want you to try them and to think about your own anchor foods. 

Food is not about new trends and new ingredients. That’s fun, but it’s not important. What’s important is that food, in difficult times, can take you, and those you feed, to the parts of the rope bridge where you stop swaying.