[.ca] Secrets Of Jesuit Soupmaking (ISBN 014219610X)

Good Soups Great Stories:
"There is something so comforting about soup. It touches something deeply rooted in our lives." p. 5 This book is a journey around the work and through the year. The soups are divided into church seasons: Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter. It is filled with interesting stories and antidotes from Curry's travels and from Jesuit history and lore. The recipes are great and the tales make them nourishing for the soul as well as the body. With soups from around the world and tales of travels, life loss and joy, the book will be a pleasure to read. Savor the words of wisdom as you enjoy the soups. Rick Curry entered the Society of Jesus in 1961. In the last forty years he has been an actor, baker, teacher and author. He founded the National Theatre Workshop of the Handicapped, a nonprofit acting school for persons with disabilities. With both a asters and doctorate in arts he has created the first residential center for arts for persons with disabilities.

The Secrets of Jesuit Soupmaking is a gem!:
If you're looking for the ultimate gift cookbook, I can't think of a better choice than The Secrets of Jesuit Soupmaking. This book is beautifully written, and engages the reader's heart and soul unlike any other cookbook I've ever encountered. The recipes are SUPERB, and there is a year's worth of variety in this compact volume. I've loaned The Secrets of Jesuit Soupmaking more times than I can count, and everyone who's borrowed it ended up buying their own copy. That's the highest praise I can lend this wonderful book!

The stories and philosophizing are better than the recipes.:
This works better as a "memoir of soup making" rather than a book of soup recipes. Mr. Curry has an engaging and stimulating writing style and many of the stories that surround the recipes are quite delightful. The recipes themselves leave a lot to be desired. A lot of the ingredients I've never heard of and a lot of the soups are designed to be made by someone with unlimited time and patience available-not the norm in the typical American household. Some of these concoctions seem to have been designed to be exotic merely for the sake of being exotic, not because they provide superior soups. Of those recipes that seemed doable on our schedule with what we normally have at hand for our routine cooking, all were fine but none exceptional or particularly noteworthy. If offbeat soup making is your life, then this might be a good choice. For most people, I'd say look for it on a friend/acquaintance's bookshelf and read it for the stories.

Better books out there:
I was very disappointed at the quality of the recipes in this book. One recipe actually used boullion cubes for the stock!! From the tilte of the book I would think that each of these soups would be a "labor of love". None are very inspiring. I will probably never open this book again. I suggest the Willams Sonoma "Soup" highly over this.