I love lovage! Lovage is a wonderful plant that has been in use for a long time, both as a culinary and a medicinal herb. It is incredibly flavorful, high in vitamin C, and a notable source of quercetin.
It resembles celery and flat-leaf parsley. And it has an earthy, spicy, lively taste. To me it tastes distinctly, delightfully spring-y.
I’m on the lookout for the beautiful little bundles of it at the farmer’s market in the spring, and when I find it I have a hard time curbing my enthusiasm.
Lovage soup is a wildly flavorful taste of spring.
I’ve used a basic lovage soup recipe in the past which basically features onion, broth, potato and lovage. But I didn’t have potato and couldn’t find the recipe so I decided to make up my own.
I was cooking for guests so I made a good-sized batch. This yielded just under 3 quarts.
It’s a blended soup so all the chopping can be coarse.
Here’s what I used:
1 medium onion, chopped
1.5 bunches of turnip (I set the greens aside and since many of the turnips were small, I only felt the need to chop the larger ones)
2 medium carrots, chopped
1-2 Tbsp butter
~1 Tbsp Olive oil
2 quarts homemade vegetable broth
a big handful of turnip greens
a few spears of asparagus ~ I just happened to have them on hand and they were really calling to be added to the mix!
Several sprigs of lovage, tough part of stems removed, rest of stem included.
Sauté the onion in the butter & oil until soft. Add turnips and carrots, stir. Add the broth.
Bring to a boil, then simmer, covered, for just under 10 minutes.
Add the turnip greens, asparagus, and lovage, simmer for another 7 minutes, turn off.
Add salt, pepper to taste.
Blend in batches till completely smooth.
I served this with a fresh slices of a fabulous buckwheat amaranth bread and butter.
A few notes:
I meant to garnish the servings with micro-greens but it slipped my mind. I was so excited to taste it that I barely remembered to take a picture of the soup before it disappeared. The picture doesn’t really do it justice. I wish you could have smelled this while it was cooking!
Potato is great here instead of turnip & carrot. As usual, I like to improvise and work with what I’ve got. And both ways are absolutely delicious. 1 large or 2 medium potatoes would do the trick, scrubbed and roughly cubed. Use more (of the turnips & carrots, or potato) if you like a thicker soup. Or just use less broth!
You don’t need to include turnip greens. I love turnip, radish and beet greens in general, and as a rule, whenever I’m using any of these, their greens get incorporated! But you could just as easily add kale, chard or collard greens, or skip the extra greens altogether.
Lovage is a classic “little goes a long way” kind of an herb. I actually went relatively big with it in this batch ( I was excited). I probably used half the little bundle that it came in, which I’m estimating came to around 1/3 cup. But I think some recipes only call for 2 Tablespoons of the fresh herb. Even that much carries enough flavor to get the whole soup named after it.
I love lovage.
It’s a real treat. And a great way to embrace the gifts of the late spring harvest, branch out, expand your palate… and truly enjoy the principle of food as medicine.
