"But that cold soup stayed with me. It resonated, waking me up, making me aware of my tongue..."

"... and, in some way, preparing me for future events."

Anthony Bourdain wrote that about the vichyssoise he was served as a kid in traveling to Europe on the Queen Mary. (The book is the delightful "Kitchen Confidential," page 10.) Cold soup was "the first food [he] really noticed... enjoyed and.. remembered enjoying."

Anyway, Jac is into cold soup, and looking around the web for ideas he found a lovely blog post about gazpacho which included this line (from the blogger, Sarah Miller, but in the comments):

Chilled soups were a tough sell for Patrick (as they seem to be for many men).

Jac doesn't like the gendered approach to food. Why not eat (and do) what you like and not worry about it?

I guess Jac wouldn't like "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche." Remember that? I'll bet a lot of men avoided quiche as a result of seeing that title. But do real men read books like that? (Do real men read?) The subtitle is "A Guidebook to All That Is Truly Masculine." That's a real artifact from the 1980s.

Do you care about gender and food? If you do and you want to eat cold soup, let me just say that Anthony Bourdain is thoroughly macho.



Or is he?