In Val McDermid’s kitchen, every recipe is just an opening chapter

Winter means soup. I believe the world is divided in two: between those who think that soup is a meal and those who are wrong. Of course, it’s possible to have a small bowl as a starter, ahead of a main course. In winter, when I was growing up, there was always soup with our dinner – a steaming bowl to start the meal. But for real aficionados, a suitably fulsome soup is a meal in itself.

I love soup, probably because my mother was a fine soup maker. When my godson visited me, he always used to demand Nanna Da’s soup, a Scotch-broth variant with stock made from boiling beef. The piece of meat is removed before serving, shredded, then returned to the bowls when the soup is dished up. But now his partner is a pescatarian, so the boiling beef has been consigned to oblivion, replaced by a vegetable stock gel. Even the best traditions have to move with the times. Yet the soup love remains.

When I went off to university, I decided that I wanted to make dinner for a few friends to celebrate St Andrew’s Night. He is the patron saint of Scotland and 30 November is our national day. We don’t make much of a fuss over it, at least not in Scotland, but we do give a nod to our winter favourites. I hoped to impress my English friends with the richness of Scottish cuisine. I had persuaded my mother to send me a haggis in the post but I needed more. I needed soup.

“Can I have your soup recipe?” I asked on one of our occasional phone calls (occasional because I never had much cash to spare to shove into the payphone’s greedy maw and my mother was paranoid about losing her low-user rebate from the phone company). There was a long silence. “Mum, the recipe?” I prompted her.

“There isnae a recipe,” she said. “You make a stock with boiling beef or a chicken carcase, then you chop up whatever vegetables you’ve got, then throw in some lentils and barley and some dried peas or beans, whatever you’ve got, and a tin of tomatoes if you have some, tomato purée if not. Then you simmer it for a few hours. It’s no’ really a recipe, more a rummage.”

In a way, that phone call defined my view of cooking. A recipe is always a starting point. It can invariably be improved by a good rummage, then tweaking and adding other ingredients. The perennial cry in our kitchen as one or other of us is stirring a pan is, “There’s a missing middle. I think it needs some balsamic vinegar/chipotle/chaat masala/Worcestershire sauce/pickled walnuts.” Nowhere is my tendency to ignore a recipe more evident than in the area of soup.

Family legend has it that, as a small child, I announced that I didn’t like lentil soup. So my mother sneakily added a tin of tomatoes, put the new variant through a sieve and told me that it was tomato soup. I was suckered and sucked in.

Now I have a repertoire of my own. When we have shellfish on the barbecue, I gather up the heads and shells and make a rich and fragrant fish stock with garlic – wild garlic, when it’s in season – and the tops of the fennel plants that self-seed in the garden. I strain the stock, add smoked tomato paste, shallots, a tin of chopped tomatoes and some chilli powder to create a stonking fish soup. A swirl of rouille and some croutons made with the end of the rye sourdough loaf, and I defy anyone to say that it’s not a meal.

The simplest of all is mushroom soup. Chop a shallot and a couple of cloves of garlic and sweat them in some olive oil and butter. Then add a sliced punnet of whatever mushrooms are available. If there are any dried porcini in the cupboard, crumble them, pour on some boiling water and leave them to infuse, before adding them to the pan. Add whatever stock you prefer, simmer for half an hour, then pulverise with a stick blender. Serve as it comes or add a swirl of crème fraîche if you feel the need for a bit of luxury.

One of my favourites is “bottom-of-the-fridge soup”. The day before your big shop, there are always bits and pieces left that you can use up. Rub the sprouting eyes out of the potatoes, peel the strange black bits off the bendy carrots, discard the half of the red pepper with the green and brown mould, rescue the middle of the tragic leek from the squidgy outer layers and repurpose the leftover cauliflower cheese. Some sorry-looking mushrooms, a couple of onions. Three cloves of garlic. All they need is a stock gel, a can of beans (borlotti, cannellini, haricot, maybe even kidney) and a tin of tomatoes. Before you know it, you’ve conjured up a hearty Mediterranean bean soup, with a little help from the herb-and-spice shelf.

When I was a trainee journalist on starvation wages, I used to make a vat of soup on a Sunday evening. Proper soup, with vegetables that I had chosen for the job. Leek and potato; lentil and bacon; mushroom and onion; minestrone; a trusty Scotch broth. That, plus a loaf of bread from the bakery under our office, kept me going till Friday and cost very little, leaving enough cash for the weekend jug of Devon farm cider.

Making big pans of soup in winter is a habit that I still cleave to. It’s central heating for the soul. My partner is in the other camp and she really doesn’t understand what she’s missing. Instead, she leans in to stews and casseroles, rich with venison, garlic, chillies, corn and chocolate, or curries from every corner of Southeast Asia, or tofu, red peppers and shallots with crispy sage leaves that crack into flavour in the mouth. I love her cooking – even when it’s a bottom-of-the-fridge curry. But, left to my own devices, I always turn to soup.

Extracted from ‘Winter: The Story of a Season’ by Val McDermid (Hodder Press), which is available now.