In the Kitchen with Caroline Wright
Caroline Wright is a bon vivant in the truest sense: her stories and recipes revolve around living every moment fully, with love, optimism and good food. Rooted in community, her work and life are creatively intertwined, lending an intimacy to her voice. Caroline shares her experience – from cooking to cancer – as a trusted guide, helping to encourage and uncover the connection that comes from living each moment with joy and gratitude.
Wright is the author of four cookbooks that range from cakes to Catalan cuisine, though her passion for community and storytelling is woven throughout each book. Her terminal brain cancer diagnosis in 2017 shifted her focus from career to health and family. She lives in Seattle, Washington, where she is lovingly known as the soup lady. Her most recent cookbook is the Soup Club which is focused on plant-based soups and is available for purchase at Book Larder. Look for her next cookbook, Seconds, to launch as a special event on January 30, 2024 with details on the Book Larder website soon.
Tell us a bit about yourself and how you started cooking?
I always cooked and gravitated toward food as a child, but it wasn’t until I went to undergraduate university in Paris as a comparative literature major that I saw it as a subject – or skill -- worthy of a career. I wrapped up my studies early and went straight into culinary school in Burgundy to work with Anne Willan at La Varenne.
Why did you write your cookbooks?
I’ve written several over the past decade. Three as having arisen from my background as a food editorial professional: a book from a column I’d wanted to write for magazines that ended up on my blog called Twenty-Dollar, Twenty-Minute Meals; a book that demystified home cake baking through transforming a simple at-home mix into over 100 recipes called Cake Magic. Another book, I helped an incredible Catalan chef based in Austin tell the story of his homeland and recipes called Catalan Food. Then, while working on that Catalan cookbook, I was diagnosed with an aggressive brain cancer and changed my diet and life significantly and devoted my time and energy to making soup for people who made soup for me while I was in treatment and writing books for my kids. I thought I was taking a step away from cookbooks to focus on my community and family, but I ended up writing a book called Soup Club – with members of my soup club, in fact – to tell that story through the unique lens of how I see and make soup, informed somewhat by my cancer but more so by my belief in what healing looks like as it relates to community, eating and cooking, and gratitude for life. Recently, I wrote a sequel soup book, a deeper dive into community and my soup exploration, called Seconds, like coming back for more. It takes what I made in Soup Club and pushes it further in every way in terms of content – more fun recipes that I didn’t have the guts to try in Soup Club-- while also very intentionally celebrating Seattle in its very form. Look for news of its launch at the Book Larder in January 2024.
What are some of your favorite fall and winter vegetables?
As a soup lady who loves to get up close and personal with vegetables, I have spent a lot of time thinking about my favorites of the season and how to celebrate them in fun ways. Fall and winter is prime soup season, after all! I love all manner of fall and winter squash, though have become quite partial to delicata, red kuri, kabocha, and of course the newest darling, honeynut. Cabbage and all manner of hearty winter greens thrill me as well, from kale (lacinato may be my favorite variety) to Asian staples (Chinese broccoli and spicy mustard greens spring to mind); it’s hard to beat the versatility of a head of cabbage, though.
How do you like to shop farmers markets?
As often as I can! Personally, I prefer to hit the market and let the vegetables dictate the dish I make rather than the other way around. So much of my work life revolves around making recipes – so, arriving at a market with an idea of what to look for, often with a list in hand – so ambling through a space where bounty is literally overflowing from the growers themselves is an incredible privilege.
You have a passion for soups. How did that get started?
I mentioned my cancer diagnosis as it related to bibliography as a cookbook author, as a fact on my career timeline. I was very fortunate at the time of my diagnosis to have family swoop in to care for me and my kids. However, they were too busy and overwhelmed to cook, and I simply couldn’t, so I was eating random and not particularly healthful meals. In response to people asking how they could help, I replied with the request to be brought homemade soup. It showed up in a cooler set outside our front door multiple times a day for months. People – neighbors, friends, strangers – brought it by and left it for me with healing wishes and letters, stories. I had always understood the power of food to care for someone from my career, but had never experienced it before. Eating it, oftentimes alone at a table in between appointments, changed me. I imagined the cook making the soup and its recipe, connecting me to my work brain, as I ate with deep gratitude for the meal. It made me want to make soup for people so it could heal them in ways they didn’t know they needed, while also nourishing their bodies. When I survived the year I was given to live, having experienced the whiplash of clarity that comes from a harrowing diagnosis only to be thrust back into “normal” life a year later, making soup was the only thing that made sense to me. That having a very real practice of gratitude for my being alive that exercises my creativity and has the power to heal people is the only pursuit worthy of the gift of time I’ve found.
What tips do you have for home cooks for making soup or being creative with ingredients?
To throw out what you think what “should” be. When I approach making a new soup recipe, I think of what ingredients and ideas I want to play with, maybe look up how other cooks might have to say about them or maybe not, and just decide what I want the recipe to communicate: always seasonality, always satisfaction, but what else. It infuses joy and growth into the process without the need for permission.
What are some of your favorite meals and soups for fall and winter?
I love a good roasted vegetable, a treatment which so many fall vegetables seem to enjoy, as it seems to me the most polite form of food: it thrives with less attention paid to it, makes its work known throughout your home with rich and warm scent, and arrives on the plate with little need for dressing up.
What do you do when your soup or meal doesn’t turn out how you planned?
Determine a redeeming quality about it, depending on its deficit – the broth maybe? Then figure out a way it can be celebrated and hide the rest in something forgiving. Say, straining the broth from the veg, using the broth in a sauce at dinner, and tossing the veggies into a frittata for lunch. I’ve rarely produced anything that I would consider “ruined” for repurpose.
Who do you admire?
Anne Willan and other pioneering female food writers: Julia Child, Ida Rombauer, Edna Lewis, MFK Fisher. Newer idols include Dorie Greenspan and Samin Nosrat.
What is one of your favorite quotes?
“A party without cake is really just a meeting.” – Julia Child
I think of soup with a similar sense of humor.
Anything else that you would like to add?
Come find me the second Saturday of the month during soup season (September through May) at my Soup Stands in front of the Book Larder, where I sell cups of one of my favorite soups to support brain cancer research for the National Brain Tumor Society. (Think lemonade stand, but soup!)
Follow Caroline at @slurpsoupclub on Instagram, sign up for her monthly newsletter or visit the Soup Club website.