13 September 2013

Soup without

I prepare a lot of soups, mostly for lunch. A soup often provides the opportunity to use up left-over cooked vegetables and small quantities of uncooked vegetables that got left behind. Sometimes my soups can be closer to a stew than a broth. Some soups invite bread or toast, whereas others don't. I rarely garnish, although I probably should, and I rarely prepare croutons because they involve a lot of fiddle for not a lot of result. I rarely even consider buying soup in a can, tub or packet. (I did buy, about a year ago, a can of Blue Dragon, 'Wonton Soup', mostly because it was labelled as suitable for vegans.) Cooking soup from scratch is much more satisfying.

It must be a couple of years ago now that I prepared a tasty green-coloured soup which I served to my wife and daughter for Saturday lunch. I usually make a pea-based green soup on Saturdays, and whilst on this occasion the soup was the same colour as my Parisian pea soup, it tasted different, and had a mouth-feel more akin to the watercress soup that I sometimes make. With minimal discussion, my wife and daughter each decided, perfectly reasonably, that I had made and served  them asparagus soup (which I do anyway from time to time). After they had mopped up the last of the 'asparagus soup', I disclosed that there was no asparagus in the soup. Earlier that day, begloved, I had gingerly cut nettle tops from an overgrown part of the garden and cooked up a nettle soup.

Not long after that, I was in the process of preparing a rich miso soup with tofu, shi-itake mushrooms, arame seaweed and ramen noodles, which makes an excellent evening meal, when I discovered that I had already used up the last of the miso. It was too late to drive to the shops to buy some more, so I decided to improvise. Suspecting nothing amiss, my wife and daughter enjoyed their 'miso soup', as they usually do. On that occasion I did not reveal that there was no miso in the 'miso soup', although my wife found out about it some months later when she read my weblog posting about the occasion.

A few days ago I planned a soup for our evening meal. Although it was not my intention to prepare anything special, I was keen to experiment using a herb and a spice, each new to me. The process began at breakfast time, but required little further attention until the evening. When it came to the eating, what we tasted was a gorgeously creamy mushroom soup - much creamier than my usual mushroom soup - with fried shreds of onion (stirred in, because I rarely garnish). In the context of writing this piece it is almost needless to say that all the mushrooms (common [Agaricus bisporus], shi-itake [Lentinula edodes] and oyster [Pleurotus ostreatus]) remained untouched in the fridge.

Reflecting about these experiences, several interesting observations can be made. Expectations play an important role in determining what we perceive. If I anticipate eating miso soup, and am then presented with a dish that looks just like miso soup, then I expect to taste miso soup. If nothing significantly contradicts my expectations, I am likely to experience what I expect. (Isn't this one of the reasons why statements given by witnesses to an event can vary so greatly?) However, I think that the business about the 'miso soup' goes deeper than simply a Jedi mind-trick. According to its Wikipedia entry, the McGurk effect is a phenomenon that demonstrates an interaction between hearing and vision speech perception. The illusion occurs when the auditory component of one sound (sound A) is paired with the visual component of another sound (sound B), leading to the incorrect perception of the sound. That sound heard could be the perception of a modified version of sounds A or B, or even the perception of a different sound (sound C). The attention that sighted people give to what their eyes are seeing can easily over-ride what their ears are hearing. When expectations are added to this brew, that is, when a person expects a certain visual or auditory appearance based on the semantic information leading up to it, the McGurk effect is greatly increased.

Although we tend not to think about it, speech is perceived by various senses working together. Taste is similar. The brain is often unable to separate the various different sensory components of what it perceives. The basic tastes (salt, sweet, sour, bitter and umami) contribute only partially to the sensation and flavour of food in the mouth, other factors include the look, smell, pungency/spiciness, texture and mouth-feel. Therefore, soup that conforms to miso soup in all other respects, is quite likely to be experienced as miso soup.

Memory also has a role to play. If I am familiar with the taste of asparagus soup, but am unfamiliar with the taste of nettle soup, it makes sense to relate any new experience to past experiences, regardless of whether this is a conscious act of cognition or an involuntary process of which I am unaware. If I am not specifically attending to the soup I am eating, provided that it does not depart too far from what is already familiar to me, then I am likely to relate it to what is already familiar: mushroom soup. (At this point I am reminded of the role played by memory in the Seagull Sandwich Riddle q.v..)

I think that there is a further level at which the soup issue operates, relating to the persistence of what is already in my mind. Despite cognitively knowing that there were no mushrooms in the 'mushroom soup', but aided by my treacherous sensory experience, I was unable or unwilling to over-ride my overall experience of the soup as 'mushroom soup'. It was as though I had some emotional commitment to maintain the fiction that the soup I was eating was mushroom soup. We do this kind of thing a lot, mostly below the level of our awareness, with people and relationships. In counselling, it is termed transference.

I shall continue to make soups, partly because my daughter finds them easy to eat, but mostly because we enjoy them. I shall continue, at least from time to time, to experiment with all manner of interesting ingredients. I made an excellent miso soup yesterday evening. It had all the right ingredients (although perhaps insufficient ginger for my taste), and if it had come in a tin ...

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