Hot soup for driech days

This week, we visit the truffle festival in Sète and I make a spinach and chickpea soup that’s full of health

We’ve had days and days of grey, heavy skies, the sort of weather the Scots call driech. It’s not perceptibly raining but the pavements are wet and in the garden, the leaves are slick with moisture. I take the dogs out in the morning and they race back inside, as though they’ve forgotten that during their London lives this damp gloom would have constituted a decent representation of spring.

In the village, lots of restaurants are closed, taking their annual break between the champagne-and-oyster bustle of Christmas and New Year, and butter-scented Easter. It’s quiet. I enjoy it, this feeling of just us.

But you can have enough peace. Naturally, I’m always up for distraction. When our neighbours, Guillaume and Cathy, said they were going to the truffle festival at Sète on Sunday, we invited ourselves along. I love Sète, this mini-Marseille that faces the Etang de Thau in one direction and the Mediterranean in the other.

Inside the market hall, the stalls are busy with customers and along the middle aisle, tables are filled with people enjoying Sunday morning glasses of wine and platters of oysters, cups of coffee and pains au chocolat, plates of charcuterie and tielles (the octopus pies for which Sète is famous). I buy a basket, because I’d forgotten to bring one and as everyone knows, you can never have enough baskets.

Truffles and their price tags – they’re about €1 a gramme.

Outside the halles, there are stalls selling truffles and all manner of truffle-flavoured meats, cheeses and hot food. We taste some ham, then some crumbly Comté and truffle biscuits. A band oompahs its way around the café terraces. I later find out they’re called the Cheecky Swingers. The mayor stirs a huge vat of aligot. Over the tannoy, there’s an announcement of a truffle hunting demonstration. Dogs are always used now, rather than pigs, as they’re easier to handle and less likely to eat the bounty.

Truffled potatoes and cheese pies.

We stop for coffee on the terrace in front on the market. The women at the next table are eating creamy potatoes pungent with truffle and we quickly despatch Séan to find some for us. He comes back with plastic tubs of hot potatoes and brown paper bags containing cheese pies. We quickly swap coffee for wine and hope that by buying wine, the waiter won’t mind us eating food that wasn’t bought on the premises. He doesn’t even blink at what would under normal circumstances be an egregious breech of restaurant etiquette.

I say that I’d read somewhere that Dandie Dinmont terriers, such as our Gracie, have been trained to hunt for truffles. They’re low to the ground and have strong paws and good noses, so it doesn’t seem impossible, but then I think about Gracie and her reluctance to go outside when it’s damp and I realise I’m going have to work out another way to earn our fortune. She’s a dog for a sofa rather than a field. She doesn’t even like walking along the path around the lagoon. As soon as she realises we’re heading out of the village, she sits herself down. No. No thank you. I’m not one for the wild. She’ll walk forever through the maze of old streets and will sit so quietly beneath a café table, I sometimes forget she’s there. Her fancy London ways are deeply engrained. You’d honestly be better off taking your chances with a pig.

The new basket at the front, making itself at home.

Spinach and chickpea soup

The market is full of squeaky-fresh spinach and I just can’t get enough of it. I eat it by the handfuls in salads and in soups like this one. Of course you can use frozen spinach, but you will miss the miraculous vanishing act of piling a laundry-basket-worth of green leaves into a pan and within seconds watching it reduce to a teacupful.

This soup is substantial enough to eat as a whole meal, especially if you add some pearly barley, pasta or lentils to the mixture.

Serves 6

2 tbsp olive oil
100g lardons or bacon, diced or cut into thin strips
1 medium onion, about 200g, diced
1 large leek, about 300g, trimmed, halved lengthways and thinly sliced
3-4 smallish potatoes, about 250g, scrubbed and cut into 1cm dice
1 large carrot, about 120g, cut into 1cm dice
1 large celery stick, about 100g, diced
4-6 garlic cloves, halved, any green germ removed and thinly sliced
1.2 litre chicken stock
½ tsp chilli flakes, optional
1 x 400g chickpeas, drained and rinsed
2-3 tbsp pearl barley, or some small pasta such as orzo, or some green or red lentils - this is optional, but it makes it a more substantial soup
300g fresh spinach, any tough stems removed, well washed then roughly shredded
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

To serve
A few tablespoons of crème fraîche and some finely chopped chives

Warm the olive oil in a large, heavy-bottomed saucepan over a medium heat – it’s good to use one with a lid, but if you don’t have a lid you can use a plate. Sauté the lardons or bacon until lightly golden, then toss in the onions and lower the temperature a bit. Cook gently, stirring now and again, for about 10 minutes.

Add the leeks, potatoes, carrot and celery to the pot and cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes.

Add the garlic and stir for a minute then pour in the stock. Add the chilli flakes if you’re using them and season well with salt and pepper.

Add the chickpeas and also the pearl barley, pasta or lentils if you’re using them too. Let the soup simmer gently for 20-25 minutes, until the vegetables are very tender and the barley, pasta or lentils are cooked through.

Now, start adding the spinach. If you’re using fresh spinach, there will be a lot of it so you may need to add it in batches. Add a handful or two, stir and put the lid on for a minute or two until the spinach has wilted into the soup. Continue until all the spinach is incorporated into the soup. You don’t need to cook it longer than it takes just to wilt the spinach. Taste and add more salt and pepper if it needs it.

Ladle the soup into warmed bowls and finish with some spoonfuls of crème fraîche and sprinklings of finely-chopped chives.

Printable recipes

Celeriac Soup With Lardons

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Market haul, January 21, 2025

This week’s market haul comprises: cèpe sausages, ham, 13 eggs, as is traditional, Jerusalem artichokes, persimmons, clementines, a little free parsley, a capon carcass for making stock, a small wholegrain loaf, limes, chocolate oranges (you find these around Christmastime, the “chocolate” is because of the dark brown skin, not because of the flavour – they are sweet, perfumed, and sherbet-y), purple and yellow carrots, purple vitelotte potatoes, red onion, shallots, sweet potato, pears, spinach, chocolate bars from Entremets et Chocolat in the village, the pretty packaging shows the church in Marseillan and the cathedral in Béziers, where they have a stall in the covered market.