Twelve Months of Monastery Soups (Paperback)

by Victor D'Avila-Latourrette (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Offer your guests a big bowl of warmth and comfort--stir up some homemade soup! Brother Victor-Antoine d'Avila-Latourrette, author of From a Monastery Kitchen, follows the months of the year with simple recipes using seasonal ingredients. The soup recipes are international as well--try some Polish Pearl Barley Soup in February and Traditional Austrian Cheese Soup in November. Brother Victor-Antoine recommends chilled soups in the summer for refreshment; June's creamy Chilled Carrot Soup features the zest of ginger and lemon, and the Cold Zucchini Soup in August is delightful with the recommended lemon basil. The simplicity of the recipes makes them suitable for beginning cooks, who will learn that a great variety of flavors can be produced just by changing the order in which the vegetables are sautéed or by using vegetable broth instead of beef bouillon. Twelve Months of Monastery Soups is a delicious introduction to the art of soup making. As Brother Victor-Antoine notes, "soup remains a faithful friend during all of life's occasions."

From Library Journal
Latourrette, a Benedictine monk in a monastery in upstate New York, is the author of several cookbooks, including From a Monastery Kitchen (HarperCollins, 1989), which sold more than 100,000 copies. Brother Victor grew up in France, and his background is evident in his soup recipes, which also reflect other cuisines?from Mexican to Italian to Arabic. He offers close to 180 seasonal recipes, the majority of them vegetarian, all of them simple and easy; historical woodcuts add charm to the book. [BOMC selection.]
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Broadway (January 5, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767901800
• ISBN-13: 978-0767901802
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 7.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #54,685 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Practical soup from a practical monk, August 19, 2000

By	M. J. Smith (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Twelve Months of Monastery Soups (Hardcover)

Twelve Months of Monastery Soups is an excellent, seasonally based cookbook for practical soup making. However, you must take its estimation of servings as dubious - his "two servings" is eight servings as a meal in my house. Three things separate this volume from other soup cookbooks: (1) the soups are arranged by month that the ingrediants would be readily available in your garden or green grocer's. (2) the recipes are international but are the cooking "of the people" not of exotic chefs (3) delightful line drawings, quotations, odds bits of trivia etc. are sprinkled throughout the pages.

To give you a flavor of the variety of recipes presented: for March we find a German Saint Lioba Beer and Mushroom Soup, a Spicy (East) Indian Soup, a Basic Onion Soup, a Tuscan Green Vegetable Minestrone, an Everyday Potato Soup, a Garlic Soup, a Lima Bean Soup, a Beguine Cream Soup, a Saint Patrick Irish Cheddar Soup ... All the recipes are easily made; they have clear instructions and ingrediate lists.

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent collection of simple soups, January 25, 2002

By	Westley (Stuck in my head) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This cook book has a very good collection of simple soups (mostly vegetarian) that can be made quite easily. They are grouped by month and take advantage of the fresh produce that are in season. One of the great benefits of these recipes is that most of the ingredients are relatively inexpensive and healthy (e.g., carrots, onions, celery, beans). The recipes vary a great deal in taste, although many have similar ingredient lists. A great testiment to the diversity of soup. I have, however, noticed that many of the recipes call for a rather large portion of oil and turn out somewhat greasy. I recommend cutting the oil if it seems excessive.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well concieved seasonal treatment. Great source., February 4, 2005

By	B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

`Twelve Months of Monastery Soups' by Brother Victor-Antoine d'Avila-Latourrette set the model for this author's later book on twelve months of salads which I have already reviewed and which has become my constant `go to' book whenever I want to make a salad.

This book on soups is in a much more crowded field, as soups appear to be one of the most popular topics for single dish or single method cooking, probably just slightly behind grilling and baking cookies. It is certainly a more crowded field than books on salads. But, this book has two really important facts going for it in the face of this crowd of books.

First, soups are a dish where seasonality is not only important for which ingredients are available. Seasonality is important to the recipe as well. Heavy hearty soups are great in January while clear soups and cold soups are just the thing for July. Even when a recipe such as borsht is better suited to cold weather, the recipe in this book is lightened up and served cold to suit the summer, when many of it's ingredients come into season.

Second, Brother d'Avila-Latourrette really makes these soups on a regular basis and is dedicated to his subject in a way that journeyman cookbook writers are not. The good brother's book may not be quite a match for books from heavyweights such as James Peterson, author of `Splendid Soups' and Barbara Kafka's `Soups, A Way of Life', as these people are professionals of the highest water whose professionalism provides the quality which otherwise comes from passion and familiarity. Their professionalism will also provide the kind of recipes and background on good stock making which the good brother does not cover in depth. His recipe for chicken broth is simple, but not as clear as it could be, since it gives instructions based on burner settings, not endpoints described in terms of what is happening in the stockpot.

I have made several soups from this book and I find the recipes every bit as good and every bit as simple as Brother Victor-Antoine's recipes for salads. And, doing a simple soup recipe is a lot harder than doing a simple salad recipe. Unlike recipes by Peterson and Kafka, not all of these recipes fall into the `gourmet' camp. Some actually use bouillon cubes. And yet, when I did such a recipe, I was totally pleased with the success with which the recipe brought out the taste of mushrooms, the headline ingredient. I was especially pleased with this as mushrooms are one of my favorite foods and the main attraction of mushrooms is to take on the taste of other ingredients with their native taste blending into the background.

All of Brother Victor-Antoine d'Avila-Latourrette's books are decorated with Medieval and Renaissance woodcuts plus quotes from both religious and folk sources. Accouterments of this sort are a two-edged sword. I stumbled across a series of cookbooks done in rural Americana with exceedingly cute colored pencil or watercolor drawings and homey sayings which simply detracted from the book as a collection of recipes, since the relevance and the quality of the sayings was weak at best. The decorations and commentary in this book have exactly the opposite effect. They enhance the experience of reading the book and supply useful grace notes to the recipes.

The mix of recipes is a very nice combination of the familiar and the unusual. With borsht, minestrone, and bouillabaisse, we get Brussels sprout soup, Shaker style soup, cold salmon soup, and a hermit's soup. Added to the seasonality of recipe and ingredient, there is a seasonality of tradition, as many of the recipes are specific to a particular holiday, although many saint's days may be familiar only to card carrying Catholics.

I heartily recommend this over many more detailed but less inspired books on soup.And, unlike another reviewer, I assure you the recipes I tried were anything but bland.