Soup Of The Day

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Yesterday we decided to go for lunch at one of my favourite little pubs in a village near here. The Queen’s Head has been serving refreshments to weary travellers since, I believe, the 1750’s (and possibly before). It sits on what used to be the main coaching road from London to Cambridge, so it must have seen quite a lot of trade in those days. With the decline of the mail coach network in the mid-19th century, however, the route lost its importance and became just a minor road linking villages in Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire. Since Newton was never anything more than a church, a large estate and a few farms, the population has never been more than a hundred or so people and the fact that the pub has survived at all is something of a miracle. It is a tiny place, really. No more than a two room cottage with some rooms added in the 19th century and the 1960’s. Inside, everything is just as it was fifty or more years ago. The back of the main bar (the original cottage) is occupied by a huge brick inglenook fireplace. The dark red walls are decorated with a few old prints, some horse brasses and a red deer head and antlers mounted on a wooden shield. In a second, smaller, fireplace in the front part of the room smoulder a few logs which are the only heat source and which tinge the air with a blue haze through which the sunlight slants from the bay window at the front. The food, which is what we came for, is basic but good - thick-cut and generous sandwiches and soup are what is always on offer but salads and baked potatoes are also available from time to time, as the season dictates. The sandwiches are prepared on the bar in full view, freshly cut from locally baked bread and large joints of home-cooked beef and ham, a side of smoked salmon and a choice of whole cheeses. All this can be, of course, accompanied by some beautifully kept beers, all drawn directly from barrels which are racked behind the bar - no cellar or hand-pumps here! It is the soup, however, for which the Queen’s Head is famous and it varies from day to day but is always a thick, fragrant, steaming broth made from whatever vegetables are in season and the stock made from the bones of the roast meats. Like everything else on offer, it is served from a cauldron standing on the bar. There is no name for the soup, even though it changes from day to day. The only guide to its content is a laminated sheet, hand-written and hand-coloured, which shows the different colours in which the soup may appear and what it may accordingly contain.