Delia Smith Mushroom Soup Recipe

There’s no stock in Delia Smith’s mushroom soup, because the dark water left from soaking dried porcini becomes its base. Chestnut and dark-gilled mushrooms soften in butter with onion, garlic, thyme and nutmeg, then simmer gently in that liquid with Madeira and a little milk. Most of it is blended while some of the mushrooms stay in pieces, and it serves 4 to 6.

Delia put it in her Vegetarian Collection (2002) as a classic English mushroom soup, only made deeper with the porcini. There’s no cream in the pan, just one heaped tablespoon of crème fraîche, marbled through the bowls at the end.

It’s the everyday one of her four mushroom soups. The other three are a richer walnut soup she makes at Christmas, a soup with cream for one person and a light Chinese soup with rice, and each is explained in the questions below.

FAQs

What gives it so much flavour?

The dried porcini. Delia admits she’s been told Italians never put porcini into soup, but she finds even 25g gives a depth you’d otherwise only get from wild mushrooms.

They work twice over here. The soaked mushrooms are chopped back into the pan, and their soaking water, strained through a paper-lined sieve, does the job a stock would normally do.

Which other mushrooms work best?

Dark ones, like the two she uses here. In her book for cooking for one she explains that the dark, flat, open-gilled kind have more flavour than closed button mushrooms.

I’d leave the small white buttons for salads, as they give a paler, milder soup, which is my own view.

Can I use sherry instead of Madeira?

Yes, and it’s what she reaches for in her other mushroom soups. Both the walnut soup and the soup for one use dry sherry, so 150ml of a dry sherry is a natural swap here, which is my own suggestion.

What is her mushroom and walnut soup?

It’s her special-occasion version, for 8, and she printed it twice. Dried porcini, mushrooms, carrots, celery, onion, leek and herbs barely simmer for an hour, then the vegetables are puréed. A second batch of finely chopped mushrooms is fried, the soup goes back in with 110g of ground walnuts, and it’s finished with single cream, dry sherry and lemon juice, with wafer-thin raw mushroom slices on top.

The two printings differ a little. The 2003 one in her Soup collection uses plain water and a little sage, while the 2009 one in Delia’s Happy Christmas swaps in vegetable stock, drops the sage and adds croutons. There she points out that walnuts are at their best at Christmas, and it sits among the starters in that book.

Does Delia have a cream of mushroom soup?

Yes, though it’s made for one person. Her Creamy Mushroom Soup in One is Fun (1985) uses 110g of mushrooms softened with a small onion, a splash of sherry and nutmeg, then simmered in milk with stock or water and a spoonful of mushroom ketchup. She blends half, adds a little lemon juice, and stirs a tablespoon of single cream through just before serving.

To make it for four, I’d simply multiply everything by four, which is my own maths.

What about her Chinese mushroom soup?

That’s the lightest of the four. It’s in her Complete Cookery Course, where 350g of small flat mushrooms and two onions are cooked in a spoonful of oil, then simmered in 1.75 litres of chicken stock with 2 tablespoons of long-grain rice. Arrowroot thickens it at the end, along with chopped spring onions.

She stresses it needs a really good chicken stock. If you can find dried Chinese mushrooms, she suggests using 175g of them with the same weight of ordinary ones, soaking the dried ones in some of the stock for 30 minutes first.