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Soups have done a pivot, which isn’t easy to do when you’re a soup. They used to be a first course, after which you ate a main course. In gentlemen’s clubs and on ocean liners, the entrée was always a soup. In restaurants, there was always a delicate, refined, minted pea veloute or a creamy vichyssoise of potato and leeks, served in shot glasses or demitasse cups.
Illustration by Simon Letch.
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These were show-off soups, sipping soups, not stop-you-in-your-tracks soups. At his 1980s restaurant Fleurie in Toorak, chef Iain Hewitson would appear at your table clutching a half-bottle of champagne, which he would ceremoniously pour into your bowl of bright-green pea soup. Around that time, French chef Alain Chapel created the “cappuccino” mushroom soup – a creamy, velvety, luxurious thing frothed with a stick blender and sent out in a little porcelain beaker. And I’ll never forget the lilting sweetness of Liam Tomlin’s sweetcorn and basil veloute that began every meal at Sydney’s Banc restaurant in the 1990s. It was made by whizzing sweetcorn purée with a stock made from the corn cobs themselves.