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Far Eastern cuisine has done many things for our dining and one unnoticed element is to reintroduce the soup to the middle classes. The most popular soup, regrettably, being the sweet corn soup and in urban areas, where there are Thai options, the Tom Yum.But for the Chinese and Thai varieties, the traditional soup, so much a commonplace of Raj dining, was fast disappearing.

Some of the fancier Indian 5-star restaurants tried to pass off the shorba as a kind of Indian soup, but it does not have the provenance of a proper soup.

Soups in the classical sense are the beginning of a meal and are part of the elaborate course by course dining protocol the British introduced.The only natives who have and continue to insist on a strict course by course manner of eating are the Bengalis but they do not start with soup.

If the Chinese cuisine has made soup a feature of restaurant dining once again, multinationals have sought to tap the growing market for fast food, producing perfectly ghastly packet soups consisting of all kinds of chemicals and preservatives such as monosodium glutamate.

So between the ubiquitous and bland sweet corn coup and the instant variety of packet soup, a whole tradition of cuisine dating back to Roman times has been traduced. This, I find profoundly sad, as good soup is relatively easy to make, delicious and with the right ingredients, extremely nutritious. One of my favourite cook books is Lindsay Bareham’s A Celebration of Soups (Penguin Books 1994) in which the author, an eminent food critic, draws upon an intimidating range of soups, describing the sheer versatility and ingenuity with which chefs recreate and adapt classics.

At a personal level, this cookbook came in handy when an eminent vegetarian foodie and cookbook writer was to come to dinner. I was going to serve a Florentine soup, the spinach soup with a slice of boiled egg. Normally, the spinach soup is made with a robust chicken stock, nutmeg and a little cream. With vegetarian stock the taste was nowhere near the original. From Lindsay’s book I came across a spinach and pistachio soup recipe which involved the addition of pistachios, creating a nutty and subtle undertone which gave the soup a different dimension.

If a good stock is the heart of a good soup, it pays to learn the art of stock making, largely forgotten in these days of stock cubes. The trick is to use a few chopped vegetables like onions, garlic, potatoes and carrots, avoiding strong flavoured vegetables like broccoli or cabbage. You simmer the vegetables and strain. You can easily store it in containers and freeze it. It is innovative to use some Japanese flavours such as Konbu Dashi and Shitake Dashi. You can buy them from Nature’s Basket and they transform the ordinary into exotic.

In a hot climate, chilled soups are an attractive option.Apart from the usual suspects, I came across a very simple one served in the Indigo Deli, a packet of buttermilk (chaas), freshly juiced watermelon and a few sprigs of rosemary; the colour is inviting and the taste divine. It takes 10 minutes to make. Another very attractive cold soup which I had at the Conde Nast rated south Goa boutique hotel, the Vivenda dos Palhaco, was a carrot and orange soup in which the flavours blended beautifully. Try it some time.