Hacker News Reader

Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

This article has me scratching my head honestly. "I decided I wanted to become a person who makes soup" - isn't soup one of the easiest things to cook? I'm not really into cooking myself, but even I could throw together one given a recipe and some time. I'm not sure what kind of soup she was thinking about though, if you first need to buy articles worth hundreds of dollars to cook one...

View on HN

There are two things going on here. For people who actually make soup - making soup can be a very lengthy process. For example, chicken soup is generally made by boiling down a chicken carcass for many hours and then adding veg and seasoning for flavour. On a practical level, you can then freeze the soup and it'll last for months. It's a great way of having a healthy, easy meal waiting for you any time. You can also really change and play with the recipe to come up with something great.

Cast iron is great because its really heavy and stores heat so it's great for slow cooking, and you want enamel because it reduces maintenance (uncoated cast-iron absorbs what it's cooking which is why you never cook tomatoes in a cast iron skillet). Le Creuset are great quality, last forever, and are well designed which is why they command a premium.

The point of the article is that actually she doesn't want to make soup, she wants to be like the people in the videos she watches and the concrete immediate step to get there is by buying the tools they have. It's like buying a gym membership in January. You want to get fit, buying a gym membership is easy. Actually going to the gym is hard.

To answer your question, yes soup is easy to make, but good soup can be as complex as a full meal. A good soup comes from a good stock and a good stock only comes from building it yourself. So you need chicken or beef bones, vegetable pealing, correct spicing, a crock pot and several hours of a low simmer just to build the base. After that you have to build the soup, lets say you are making french onion, one of the simpler classics. You need a good beef stock, you need to select your onions, braise them. Then you need the beef stock you built, you need to select a Sherry or Madeira, you have to select a Gruyere cheese, you then have to simmer this, transfer it to crocks and then broil in the oven.

Love answers where something is 'easy', then a complex series of step fraught with opportunities for error is given. I remember my brother telling me than Linux was easy to customize (for something; don't remember) then followed 4 pages of line-item build instructions.

Anyway, I buy my stock in boxes from the big-box store and its fine. For me.

There are tons of things that are easy to do well enough from a practical standpoint but can be made as elaborate as you want to for showmanship purposes. Cooking is one of those things.

Look at the "rules" that people who live in 500k houses and drive 50k cars have for using and maintaining cast iron. Some 1930s housewife who was all out of fucks to give most certainly did not go through all those motions when she used an identical pan and it worked out just fine.

When GP says "good soup" he/she means soup you can show off (or bring the leftovers in to work as your lunch to show off there) as a status symbol. It may also be good in the practical sense (good tasting, filling, healthy, etc.) but that's secondary to the showmanship aspect of making it.

For me it is not about the showmanship, I am not the type to even take a picture of my food. What I did do though was grow up in a family of good southern cooks on both sides of the family, so I had a foundation in cooking from a young age and developed a taste for quality. I can tell how something is made by tasting it, flavor is all I really care about in food, as such I became interested in developing flavor from a young age. I attended culinary school because of that and though I wanted to be a chef until I got a real job in a commercial kitchen and quickly revised my dreams away from the culinary arts all together. About the only thing I engage in showmanship on when it comes to cooking is BBQ Brisket, I am pretty damn proud of mine as it is a hard art to master.

My point was to highlight that it can be as complicated as you want to make it. It depends on your goals, some people are OK with stock from bullion so people want the flavor of a stock from scratch but most would agree that the latter is going to be far more flavorful and thus considered better. It depends on your goals but soup can be complicated, if your goal is better flavor than run of the mill.

I've been looking around for something to occupy my time when I retire and had been considering woodworking. Looking through YouTube for possible projects and tools I might need you can see this line of thinking has gone off the scale. Taken at face value it seems you need a workshop full of power tools and/or antique planes and chisels to make something as simple as a small box.

That’s the point of the article. You don’t need it. The soup is an excuse to buy the status symbol.

Or sometimes, the status symbol is to guilt you into making soup regularly, so your purchase seems like it was not a waste. (Weaponizing the sunk-cost fallacy, as it were.)

I’ve noticed amongst my peers in their 30’s that the action of trying new things is intrinsically linked with buying new things. Maybe it’s a product of being raised in 1980s USA, but it isn’t enough to just try to put new soup ingredients in the pot you have. You must buy something that ‘sparks joy’ or ‘inspires’ the action. Value isn’t derived from the practice of something new unless accompanied by the dopamine bump of status symbol acquisition (and perhaps peer reaction to display of such symbol).

Want to start exercising? Gotta buy new $140 Lululemon tights to help inspire the action, because willpower isn’t enough.

Milliennials relish in not being able to do simple things that they took for granted because their parents did it for them. It's where bizarre neologisms like "adulting" come from. It drives clicks, that's for sure.

> isn't soup one of the easiest things to cook?

Depends on how good the soup you want to make is. Look up “how to make tonkotsu from scratch” on YouTube and you’ll find videos of people prepping their soup 2-3 days in advance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com