Winter’s here. I wore gloves yesterday to go down to our unfinished, unheated basement, a fleece jacket over another fleece jacket to walk downtown. My thoughts turn to soup, hot, strong broths overpopulated with well-cooked vegetables and bits of meat, nourishing in both the literal and the metaphorical sense.

This week I made three different main-course soups, each dating from a different era in my life.

A variant on a Portuguese clam, chickpea, and sausage soup that must have come originally from Ursula Bourne’s Portuguese Cookery (Penguin, 1973).

A Chinese cinnamon beef noodle soup very little alteRed from my favorite of Nina Simonds’s many good cookbooks, Asian Noodles: 75 Dishes To Twirl, Slurp, and Savor (Hearst Books, 1997).

And an augmented French cauliflower and mushroom soup from my brand-new copy of Lydie Marshall’s Soup of the Day: 150 Sustaining Recipes for Soup and Accompaniments to Make a Meal (HarperCollins, 2003).

I’m thinking hard about Chapter 4, How to Make a Recipe Faster or Easier or Both. All three soups are dead easy (not particularly fast). I realize I see them as easy because they slot into a program I have in my head called Make Brothy Winter Soup, MBWS for short. MBWS goes like this:

Make or buy liquids.

Fry some ingredients.

Add some liquid and some other ingredients.

Simmer.

Cool.

Add any remaining liquid and some more ingredients.

Briefly simmer.

Serve with garnishes, if any.

Here’s how I execute MBWS on my three soups.

	Portuguese clam, chickpea, and sausage	Chinese cinnamon beef noodle	French cauliflower and mushroom
make or buy	chickpea cooking water + canned clam broth + fruity white wine	crockpot beef broth	crockpot chicken broth + goat milk
fry	shallots + garlic in olive oil	scallions + garlic in peanut oil	shallots + flour in peanut oil + butter
add	chickpea broth, canned clam broth, canned clams, cooked chickpeas, cooked whole barley berries, slivers of linguiça sausage	beef broth, cinnamon, star anise, cooked beef	chicken broth, mushrooms, packaged three-veg coleslaw mix, nutmeg, cooked whole barley berries
simmer
cool
add	fruity white wine, braised arugula + chard	spinach	goat milk, parsley (as a vegetable, not a garnish), microwaved cauliflower
simmer
serve with	garlic oil, small hot peppers to flavor the broth and then discard, garlic bread	wide egg noodles	nutmeg to grate on top, again garlic bread

Regardless of its origins, the “Portuguese” soup is now wholly mine. I use bacon or ham instead of sausage; wheat berries or farro or spelt instead of barley; cannellini beans or flageolets or lentils instead of chickpeas; additional ingredients like potatoes, fried green bell peppers or Anaheims, cubes of eggplant, or chopped tomatoes.

I follow the Simonds Chinese recipe pretty closely.

I changed a lot about Marshall’s French recipe, but I think many of the good ideas in the soup are still hers. Her soup is flavored with curry powder, but she mentions in the headnote that the curry flavoring is in place of nutmeg, which she says is a cliché in France; in France but not in my house, and we had been eating a lot of Indian cooking recently, so I swapped back for the nutmeg. Her cauliflower was cooked in step 3; I was using leftover nuked cauliflower, so I tossed a little coleslaw mix in to be sure there was enough cabbage flavor in the finished soup. The greatest violence I did to her recipe was in its texture. Marshall’s version is a purée with mushroom garnish; mine is a broth with chunks. I do sometimes make pureed or half-pureed soups; their program is MTWS, Make Thick Winter Soup, and it adds a step right after the first simmer in MBWS: Puree or half-puree with immersion blender.

I’m convinced that having a dozen or so of such programs is the key to being easy in the kitchen. Instead of approaching every recipe as a completely new and forbidding set of directions, I look for recipes that fit -- or can be made to fit -- one or another of the programs in my head.

So I’m thinking, what are my programs? In addition to MBWS and MTWS, there’s Make Cold Summer Soup, Make Green Salad, Make Supper Salad, Make Chopped Salad, Make Pie, Make Pasta and Sauce, Make Roasted Vegetables. I used to have Make Bread and Make Viennese Cake, but now I execute them so infrequently that I’ve lost the knack, lost the programs. Make Poached Fruit, Make Fried Fruit, Make Fruit Crumble are still going strong.