Valorie Arrowsmith's Carrot Soup

'); //-->

Spread The Word

Choose Font Size

Food
Heirloom Kitchen

Return to:
Heirloom Kitchen Listing

Molly O'Neill is our Food Editor. She is the former food columnist for The New York Times Magazine. O'Neill is the author of three cookbooks, including the best-selling New York Cookbook (Workman Publishing, 1992), A Well Seasoned Appetite (Penguin, 1997), and The Pleasure of Your Company (Viking, 1997). She was the host of the PBS series Great Food, and edited the critically acclaimed anthology American Food Writing (Library of America, 2007). Her latest work, Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball (Scribner, 2006), recounts her childhood of growing up in a Major-League baseball family.

Sponsored by

by Molly O'Neill

Finding the perfect meal in carrot soup

You never know what little piece of you life will give you something that will one day become synonymous with family gatherings, a recipe that will prompt one’s children and grandchildren to clamor, “Tell about the time when….” For Valorie Arrowsmith, the story is about the time she answered a hand-lettered ad for household help and ended up cooking for Prince Charles. She was in England where she had completed a degree in art and design. She was young, hungry, and 4,000 miles from her family’s farm in Minnesota.

The family in need of help, the MacGillycuddys, had just left their grand estate in Ireland and were camped out in a large, drafty home in Northampton. When they heard that Arrowsmith had been a cook and a baker, they immediately put her in charge of the big, old, temperamental AGA cook stove.

“The MacGillycuddys!” her family might exclaim.

“They told me that they were expecting company the following week, a hunting party,” she replies.

And they say: “Prince Charles was coming!”

Yes, says Arrowsmith, that’s what the MacGillycuddys told her. And there she was with a difficult stove, a degree in art and design, and a few recipes that she cooked often and remembered well. She does not remember which of these she made for the prince. What she remembers is the appetite she had when she finished and got back to her little flat.

“Something warm and simple and filling!”

Yes, she says, and in an old dog-eared copy of the cookbook, Au Petit Cordon Bleu, she found a recipe for carrot soup.

“Just the thing!”

The soup –– which has evolved over the 30 years since, while she raised three girls on a Minnesota farm –– and the story of the prince and the MacGillycuddys are what her family requests for Thanksgiving, year after year.

Continue to the recipe: Crème de Carottes Soup