The story of Mushroom soup
In the villages of Poland, Russia and Ukraine, forest mushrooms were gathered at the end of summer, threaded on strings and dried for the winter. Eastern European Jews cooked them into a clear soup with potatoes, sometimes with barley, and the smell of dried mushrooms filled the house. In Israel, with white and brown cultivated mushrooms in every supermarket, mushroom soup became mostly a cream soup.
Most creamy mushroom soups in Israel are made with cream, which makes them dairy. In a kosher kitchen that means they cannot open a meat meal. So the main recipe here is parve: a roux of oil and flour for body, oat cream for richness, and dried mushrooms with a little soy sauce for the depth that butter usually brings. The dairy version is among the variations.
What makes Mushroom soup itself
Unlike most vegetable soups, the flavour here is built in the pan, not the pot. A steamed mushroom tastes of water, a browned one tastes of nuts and meat. Three things make this soup: browning in batches, the soaking liquid of the dried mushrooms as part of the broth, and blending only half the pot, so there is both cream and bite.
