Advanced Nutrition Network
Hippocrates Soup
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A saltless vegetable soup from Max Gerson, the physician whose work on the sodium-potassium balance sits underneath this whole site.
No salt, no oil, no stock. Vegetables, water, time, and a food mill. Once you stop expecting it to taste like tinned soup it is genuinely good, sweet and deeply savoury from the vegetables alone.
Ingredients
Gerson's original list:
- 1 medium celery root (celeriac), or 3 to 4 stalks of celery
- 1 lb potatoes
- 1½ lb tomatoes, more in summer
- 2 medium onions
- 2 small leeks, or 2 more onions
- 1 medium parsley root, if you can find one
- Garlic, as much as you like
- A little fresh parsley
- Filtered water
No salt, no oil, no stock, no spices. That is the design rather than an omission. The soup exists to deliver potassium without sodium.
Method
- Scrub, do not peel. Much of the mineral content sits just under the skin, and it is all going through the mill anyway.
- Cut into small cubes, roughly even so everything softens together.
- Cover with water, just enough. Extra water dilutes it.
- Simmer about two hours, covered, on low heat. Slow is the point.
- Add the parsley near the end.
- Run it through a food mill.
Gerson described the result as thick and creamy, with only fibres and peel left behind in the mill. That is accurate. It comes out the texture of a purée with no cream, no butter, and no thickener.
Keeps three days refrigerated. Make a large batch.
Why a food mill rather than a blender
A blender pulverises everything, skin and fibre included, and the result stays faintly grainy. A food mill presses the soft flesh through and holds the tough material back. What comes out is smooth and what stays behind is the part you did not want.
It is also a hand tool with nothing to burn out.
If a blender is what you have, use it and do not overthink it. If you plan to make this regularly, the mill changes the result.
How to eat it
As a starter before lunch and dinner, which is how Gerson served it. A cup ahead of a meal takes the edge off appetite and gets a good amount of potassium in before anything else.
It also works as a base. It is essentially a saltless vegetable stock with body, so other soups can be built on top of it.
The first few days will taste strange. You have spent a lifetime with salt in soup. Give it until day four. Palates recalibrate faster than people expect.