David Ansel

Soup’s on
David Ansel's "The Soup Peddler's Slow and Difficult Soups" (Ten Speed Press, $17) can actually be read like an engaging novel. Ansel is a laid-back hippie-type who delivers his homemade soup around Austin, Texas, pulling it in a trailer attached to his bike (so he's both a soup peddler and a soup pedaler).

Anecdotes between the recipes sketch out a wacky, friendly world that's straight out of "Austin Stories." Ansel is the Soup Man, his clients are the Soupies, his bike is Old Yellow, and he engages in a running feud with warm-weather competitor The Ice-Cream Man. Ansel says the use of "Slow and Difficult" in his book's title is an unsubtle dig at our fast-food culture. Some of his soups are about the opposite of "slow and difficult" as you can get. His chompy-chomp black bean soup is ready in just 10 minutes with hardly any chopping, and it's amazingly tasty. (You purists who want nothing canned in a recipe, however, run away while the rest of us dig in.)

While the black-bean soup and the equally simple gazpacho were tasty treats, Ansel's Hungarian goulash completely flopped for me. The stew beef never tenderized nor tasted anything but bland. And it can be tough for a home cook to dive into many of Ansel's recipes — he warns that his smoked duck and andouille gumbo will take all day. Others require ingredients that may be tough to find — amchur powder for the pumpkin-pear soup; pasilla chiles, chipotle en adobo and textured vegetable protein for the chili; guascas for the ajiaco.

Reading Ansel's book is like dropping into a Texas version of Maupin's "Tales of the City." It's hard to read about life in Ansel's Austin and not want to move there, buy a house on his soup route and become a regular at his friends' monthly Family Dinner. But as far as the soup recipes go, this cook is sticking to the simpler ones. —G.F.C.

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