Vichyssoise: a cool soup for balmy days

I have never been a huge fan of cold soup. It has always seemed to me to be contrary to everything good about soup: soup is inherently warming and cheering. It demands large portions and an accompanying doorstep of bread. Who on earth would want to chill it down and serve it in tiny portions – and without bread and butter? Madness!

Historically, I have made an exception for gazpacho and salmorejo on the basis that they hail from hot countries, and that they aren’t thickened with dairy. But I drew the line at what I thought of as hot soups served cold. Vichyssoise was doubtless the worst of them: give me a vat of hot leek and potato, but spare me the cold stuff.

Sometimes, we don’t get what we want, we get what we need. And during a recent heatwave, I had to make vichyssoise for work. I bought the ingredients, followed the recipe, but was making it under a certain level of duress. I wasn’t interested in it; I couldn’t see the appeal. But, greed getting the better of me, I absent-mindedly dipped my spoon into the finished soup. I’m not sure if you can have a Damascene moment with a potato-based soup, but I reckon I came as close as you can. It was impossibly refreshing – and completely delicious. So now, I take it all back. Cold soups, forgive me. I was wrong. Vichyssoise and hot leek and potato soup share the same qualities of being soothing, comforting, only one is made for the hottest days of the year, and one for the coldest.

Although leek, potato and onion soup in its hot incarnation has a long history (often called potage Parmentier after Monsieur Parmentier, a nutritionist, who popularised the use of potatoes in France in the 18th century), Vichyssoise’s origins and age is a little more up for debate.