Damon Lee Fowler

Tomorrow is my birthday, and ushers in the last year of my sixties.

It's a milestone I suspect none of us is ever ready to face, and is coming at an especially difficult time for my family and for our country. Consequently, that need for comforting soup in my household hasn't lessened; if anything, it's only gotten more pronounced.

Whenever that need becomes acute, the soup that provides it best isn't, oddly enough, one I grew up on, but a classic Italian minestrone. True, it's a kissing cousin of my grandmother's vegetable soup, but its comfort isn't rooted in childhood memories as are most other "comfort foods." When I was traveling to teach a lot, Read More 

When most of us use the words "comfort food" we usually mean something that warms us both inside and out, wrapping us up physically and emotionally. But during the dead heat of summer, when the humidity turns the air into hot mayonnaise, the sun turns the pavement into a short-order griddle, and we're all, as old-guard southern ladies persist in calling it, "glistening," comfort turns ice cold and is served in tall, frosted glasses and chilled bowls.

The irony is not lost on me that two of my own ultimate comfort foods are soups that are at their best in that dead heat, when their key ingredients are at their peak: my grandmother's vegetable beef soup Read More 

One of the great ironies of summer is that it's the very time of year when vegetable soups are at their best, since all the ingredients are at peak season, just when the last thing one wants to do is stand over a hot stove.

Luckily, these soups really don't require the cook to stand over them for more than a few minutes. You put it together before the kitchen is heated up, hang around only as long as it takes for it to come to a simmer, then just walk away Read More 

Our first full winter in Virginia has been typical of the Mid-Atlantic South. There's been just enough snow to be fun without getting tedious, and we've enjoyed as much clear, crisp sunshine as rain. Temperatures have dipped just enough to make fires, soup, and hot toddies welcome, but not too cold for attacking the weeds and vines that have overrun our garden while they're dormant.

It's the kind of weather that's perfect for chicken soup, and hardly a week has passed without a pot of broth simmering on the back of my stove, filling the house with its warming, appetite-stirring fragrance.  Read More 

If my entire life as a cook could be summed in one thing, it would be a lifelong—and so far—failed quest to reproduce my maternal grandmother’s summer vegetable soup. Her kitchen was where I first cooked, and we made many a pot of vegetable soup together during my summer visits. The memory of its taste remains vivid more than half a century later. But somehow, I’ve never been able to get my own to taste and look exactly like hers.

When I was trying to construct a recipe for my first cookbook, in her typical way, MaMa said, “I never measured anything for soup, so just guess.” Well, of course, she measured— Read More