An Exaltation of Soups (17 page)

3. Strain the soup, removing the chicken and discarding the vegetable solids. Return the broth to the pot, skimming any fat. Let the chicken cool, uncovered, then shred and reserve, discarding the skin and bones. (You may refrigerate the broth at this point.) Cut the liver and gizzard into small pieces and reserve them apart from the chicken.

4. Heat the peanut oil in a skillet over medium heat and fry the garlic for 1 minute. Toss in the onion and sauté until transparent, then add the liver and gizzard pieces, the diced chiles, and the annatto
powder and sauté, stirring constantly, for 2 minutes. Remove from the heat and set aside.

5. Bring the broth in the soup pot back to a low boil over medium heat and add the noodles, simmering them for 5 minutes. Add the shredded chicken, the sautéed vegetables from the skillet (washing the skillet with the broth to get every scrap of seasoning into the soup), and the fish sauce. Simmer for 5 more minutes. Taste for seasoning, adding more fish sauce as needed.

Ladle the soup into bowls, evenly distributing the noodles, and garnish each portion with crispy garlic, green onion slices, and a slice of calamansi or lime.

“THE FURY OF RAINSTORMS”

O
NCE UPON A TIME
, soup was primarily prescribed to
stimulate
the appetite, not depress it.

Oh, right. Mmmm. But those were the days when even the leisure classes got a fair amount of exercise (no cars), didn’t eat snacks (no refrigeration; mouth-buckling preservatives), and had little concept of “empty calories.” It was also a time when ideal feminine beauty was on the plump side, manly torsos were comfortable, and fleshiness was a sign of affluence and position in a poor, thin world. Not so anymore. And ain’t it great that soup—early on a way to stretch tough and meager ingredients, later a way to tickle dainty taste buds—now, in its soulful adaptability, is one of the most reliable ways around to shed those unwanted pounds.

How so?

For a bunch of reasons, all working together to shrink our burgeoning waistlines.

1. Eating soup at the start of a meal fills the stomach, which signals the brain to curtail appetite.
A ten-week study involving ten thousand students at the University of Pennsylvania in the late seventies gave proof to this commonsense observation. Imagine: ten thousand contrary adolescents agreed that when they started a meal with soup, they got full fast and ate less.

2. Eating soup fools the body’s natural sensors into thinking more calories have been consumed than actually have.
Dr. Elizabeth Bell,
at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted a study in 1999 to determine “if the effect of increasing the water content of food can enhance the effect of that food on satiety, therefore reducing subsequent calorie intake.” That is to say, one day, her cadre of twenty-four women began lunch with a 270-calorie chicken-and-rice casserole; the next day, they started with that same casserole plus they drank a 10-ounce glass of water with it; on the third day, they started with the casserole and water mixed, heated, and served as a soup. After each round, researchers measured exactly how much the women ate during the rest of the meal. Hands-down victory was for the soup: instead of chowing down for 300+ calories at the open buffet, as they had the first two days, the soup eaters daintily pushed their plates away after 200 calories.

3. Eating soup is a low-calorie way of satisfying a person’s need for a certain
volume
of food.
Nutrition researcher Barbara Rolls conducted studies in the late 1990s that show people eat the same weight of food day after day, pretty much no matter what. So you can eat that weight in hamburgers or in tuna fish sandwiches or in candy bars … or you can eat that weight in soup. Now then, if you regularly choose those nice low-calorie soups—say, every day at lunch—you’re going to lose weight. Just that many fewer calories to burn.

4. Eating soup on a regular basis helps you lose weight because it changes your eating patterns.
In 1979, Dr. Henry Jordan, behavioral weight-control specialist, made some five hundred volunteers eat soup for lunch every day for ten weeks. His findings? Soup eaters consumed fewer calories and lost an average of 20 percent of their excess body weight. Why? Because soup is complicated to eat—it takes time and motor skills to consume, so you tend to eat less.

Consider: You have to sit down to eat it. You have eat it with a utensil, and you can shovel in only so much of it per spoonful. You can’t gulp it down because it’s hot. If you put it in a big bowl, you’re fooled into thinking you’re eating a big portion. Then, because it comes as a complex package of stuff—different textures,
shapes, and tastes all together and all at once—you have to work it around in your mouth, take time to process it. Not to mention worrying about slurping and slopping it all over the place.

Compare eating a 500-calorie bowl of Vietnamese
phó
, which takes a good 30 minutes of concentrated pleasure to get down, not to mention taking time to wipe the sweat off your forehead, with going to a McDonald’s take-out window so you can wolf down that 560-calorie Big Mac and super-size fries while you’ve still got the blinker on to pull out of the parking lot.

S
O
,
SOUP IS
a very good thing for dieters—a sure thing, if you eat it regularly and avoid the
crèmes
and the
beurres—
and infinitely interesting and satisfying no matter how often you eat it, whether it’s cool
tarator
, spicy
laksa
, rich
sopa de camaraõ
, or hearty borshch.

But yes, yes. I hear what you’re thinking. What about that seven-day cabbage soup diet that is specially designed to make the pounds fall off? In fact, I like it and believe that soup works
within carefully drawn limits—that
is, if you want to drop a few pounds fast, rediscover your waist, or most especially, kick-start a longer weight-loss campaign. But remember: it’s for seven days only and you should stop immediately if you feel weak or sick.