It all started with a tweet, a tweet that felt very much like a challenge.
Naturally I clicked on the link. Jackie Cameron had just posted a selection of her savoury ice creams. How thrilling. The flavours just begging to be tasted. There was the tweeted-about baked bean ice cream, biltong, red onion, Maltabella, Parma ham and Parmesan ice cream. All of them, except the Maltabella ice cream which is a breakfast ice cream, served with hot soup. Now I have eaten ice cream for breakfast but I haven’t ever dreamed of putting it in soup.
Who could resist the idea of savoury ice cream in a soup? The hot and cold mix, the element of surprise and the added blast of flavour. How brilliant.
Di couldn’t possibly have known that at the very minute that I got her tweet, I was surrounded by recipe books and was googling like mad trying to work out the menu for a drinks party. This was clearly the answer to my quest for something that would make the food a little different, something special, slightly unexpected.
Soup served in a glass would be the ideal addition to my menu. But which flavour ice cream? I felt compelled to try the baked bean version. And because I’m on a mission to find ways of using lovage, I could make the recommended potato soup and flavour it with lovage. With maybe a garnish of lovage tempura.
Good, but not good enough. This was a fattening soup, what about all the dieting, banting, no carb people? The mere addition of ice cream to a soup would be an affront to anyone watching their weight. Maybe I should make a second option that would be slightly less horrifying to a dieter? I could make a consommé with granita. That would satisfy the dieters.
Nope, I wasn’t going to do that. It didn’t feel festive and of course I was drawn to the savoury ice cream. A fresh healthy green option using some of the tons of mint in the garden at the moment would be nice. Mint and pea, of course, is always good. So which ice cream would be best with it? I wanted to keep the soups vegetarian so I immediately eliminated the Parma ham and biltong ice creams. Parmesan ice cream it would be. Jackie recommends serving the Parmesan ice cream with a courgette soup so I decided on pea, courgette and mint soup, drizzled with a mint oil.
I was a little worried about serving hot soup in summer but thought the evening could well be cool and the ice cream would of course mean the soup wouldn’t be piping hot. It might even be raining. It’s summer on the highveld, after all. Maybe it wouldn’t even be warm enough to sit outside.
Friday was a searingly hot day. Much of the vegetable garden wilted in the heat. I could hardly bring myself to go outside. It was cooler standing at the stove frying multiple pans of blini. Maybe I’d been stupid to think of a hot soup in summer. I’d been seduced by the savoury ice cream and hadn’t really thought things through. The snacks were going to be a flop. Should I abandon the soup and dash out and buy something? A platter of antipasti? There was no time for this. I just had to make what I had work.
I spent the entire day vacillating between hot, room temperature, chilled, hot, room temperature, chilled. I didn’t want to ruin the drama of the hot/frozen contrast. What to do? I could wait until 5pm and then decide. Maybe it would have cooled down or poured with rain by then.
But then my guinea pig came into the kitchen for a quick late lunch. I served him the two soups – cold from the fridge – with the ice cream. He declared them delicious.
And later that evening all the guests did, too.
Today is much cooler, it might even rain. Hot soup with cold ice cream is definitely on the menu. Well, that’s if there’s any ice cream left after my mid-afternoon baked bean and Parmesan ice cream sundae. Wish I’d made the Parma ham ice cream too.
Click here for the Parmesan ice cream recipe and here for the baked bean ice cream recipe.
Exploring Eating 