Grasp the nettle – and fear not the primeval soup

Anything can be soup. Which is not to say that everything should be. Raccoons, for example, and pewter are out of the running. As children, my sister and I loved “pretend cooking” – largely grass clippings let down with washing-up liquid, and yes, my branded line of recipes is coming to supermarkets any day now). I don’t believe in tinned soup or dried soup: my teens were fuelled by both, and look at me now. But I’ve rarely met a soup I haven’t loved. Sad? Soup. Hungry? Soup. Bored, heartbroken, too exhausted to move? Soup, soupy soup. Give me chilled and sweet (Hungarian cherry) or white and vinegary (Spanish almond) or DIY (Sichuan malatang; extra kelp please, hold the duck blood). If there is a world cuisine that excludes soup, I hope it keeps its perversions to itself.

And unlike, say, French patisserie, soup is adaptable to any mood. Give me a knife and mood-appropriate music (First Ladies of Country – wistful; Sleater-Kinney – stand back) and I’ll feed you in half an hour.

The only question is: with what?

Last weekend, as I knelt in the soil of my allotment trying to save my three remaining spinach seedlings from a lethal combination of drought, hail, tumbling branches, rats, kestrels, voles, pigeons, molluscs and ring-necked parakeets, I looked over my shoulder and noticed a vegetable miracle. Beyond the edge of my furthest bed was a cloud of thigh-high plant life: tender, verdant, doubling in size almost as I watched. I’ve spread tons of manure; I have watered and titivated. Yet my allotment remains almost bare, other than for some bolted kale and a permanent patch of sorrel. Meanwhile, unnoticed, a succulent, unendangered, iron-rich crop has been going about its business.I may be a failure when it comes to carrots, a disastrous lettuce farmer and inadequate with flowers, but if you want nettles I’m your woman.

It’s impossible to spend as much time reading recipes as I do without accidentally learning how to make nettle soup. Dimly, I recalled that, once you’d chucked in potato, water, alliums and maybe nutmeg, you had a virtually free, family-sized pot of nourishing deliciousness. How long could it take?

Obviously, I had gloves in my bag. Strangely, they didn’t work from inside the bag, but wasn’t that part of the fun? No bold adventurer remains unscarred. The patch seemed limitless; I could shun old, stringy leaves and take only the tips. Pinch – ow! – repeat; plus sorrel, wild garlic and a couple of cleavers for luck. Soon I had a full carrier bag.

By the time I’d walked home, I was ready to eat my harvest raw. Washing nettle tops in a kitchen sink isn’t easy, but my fingers were already stung beyond feeling. Blanching? OK, if I must, during the standard 95 minutes needed to soften the onion. And, fine, so none of the authors I consulted were thinking of my vegan girlfriend, with their milk, butter and chicken stock. But this isn’t my first rodeo. Sling in some oat milk, a sprinkling of Marigold powder and a tin of butter beans for body and we’d be grand. Then I’d use my stick blender, and…

Within seconds, the puny blade was choked with nettle fibres. Once, in childhood, I tried cutting an entire lawn with scissors. That was quicker. But, eventually, we were down to a purée. And that’s how I made an interesting discovery: unless you like prickly soup, fibres plus histamines is a combination best avoided. My family, at whom I’d hyped nettle soup like a corrupt TV evangelist, realised after one polite taste that they weren’t hungry after all. And I’d remembered something important: I still have three spinach plants. Give me a couple of months, and it’ll be dinner time.

James Robertshaw / Alamy Stock Photo