Chilled Pistachio, Cucumber & Rosewater Soup

A special cold soup for high summer

Disaster struck last week when I made an enormous batch of white bean & courgette soup before properly checking the weather forecast. The temperature hit the thirties, and no-one ordered my delicious soup as it wasn’t chilled. No amount of yummy pesto on top could redeem it, and I found it impossible to communicate that I wasn’t really serving it that hot. What can you do, write ‘tepid’ on the blackboard? No. In this country soup must almost alway be served be piping hot, so hot you can’t eat it without scalding your palette, unless the weather outside is even hotter, in which case a chilled soup is permissible.

At the moment I have a few on rotation: a grated cucumber and yogurt soup, like the Turkish cacik; chilled watercress soup, in the very classic English/French style, blitzed fine with a bit of potato, and soon there’ll be tomatoes and peppers for a gazpacho. In the meantime, though, there’s always ajo blanco, a rich ivory pool of blended almonds and a touch of garlic, savoury and elegant, served with chilled halved cherries or refreshing pieces of melon.

Halfway around the world in Persia, Abdoogh Khiar is a Persian yogurt soup akin to the cacik of their Turkish neighbour, this time without garlic, but with a plethora of garnishes to stir into the cold yogurt: diced cucumber, chopped radishes, mixed herbs (parsley, mint, dill, tarragon, savory, dried mint) walnuts, raisins, dried rose petals and toasted pieces of crispbread. Most delicious. I plan to make this again at the earliest opportunity. Meanwhile, I have been making an unlikely-sounding recipe that we used to cook in my Dock Kitchen days: a pistachio, cucumber, mint and rosewater soup.

This recipe moves slightly away from the chunky style of a cacik or abdoogh khiar, and to my mind has more in common with the almond soup of Andalusia. I’ve seen some recipes for pistachio soup that start off with a savoury cooked base - onions, leeks, chicken stock and so on, before whizzing in the pistachios and chilling, but the recipe I like to make is simpler: just blitz all the ingredients together and chill before seasoning and garnishing to your preference. I like to add some almonds too, as pistachios sure aren’t cheap, and not much harm will come to the flavour.