Toscanini celery soup

Toscanini celery soup is the only food that the famous Italian conductor was reputed to have taken before one of his more important concerts. He found that it calmed his nerves that were of course tuned to an unusually high pitch as the hour approached. Coordinating up to 100 highly individualistic musicians into one whole is no mean task.

This page was last updated by Dr Barrie Lewis on 29th September, 2020.

The Toscanini celery soup looks pretty drab, but it really is centre stage in this soup, salad and sandwich luncheon when it come to flavour.

Ingredients

The ingredients of Toscanini celery soup are really quite basic; we use only what's in season but the celery obviously is a must. See lower down how to make your own delicious chicken bones stock; nutritious and healthful if you can get free range birds.

1. Two sticks of chopped celery
   
2. A few florets of broccoli
   
3. One chopped onion
   
4. Half a cup of brown rice
   
5. Half a cup of chopped parsley
   
6. One cup of chicken bones bouillon
   
7. Two cups of water
   

Aside: Absolutely avoid beriberi rice. What is it? The Thiamine story. Vitamin B1. Generalised muscle weakness ...

Chicken bones bouillon

• More about Chicken bones stock ...

Extracting the cartilage and making a chicken bones bouillon and including it into Toscanini celery soup makes a powerful anti inflammatory meal; simply delicious.

I have no alternative that comes to mind if you are a vegetarian.

Toscanini celery soup with all its anti arthritis properties is for everyone; delicious in any case.

Toscanini celery soup

• Lightly saute the onion and celery in a tablespoon of butter. Never use margarine or sunflower oil to saute. Why not?
• Add the chicken bones bouillon and water.
• Add the rice.
• Simmer for 30 mins. (If you want to help save the planet, bring hard to the boil for a few mins, turn off, wait half an hour and simmer again for ten to fifteen minutes. Save 15 minutes of heating.)
• Add the parsley at the last moment. (If it's a bit hard and tough, simmer for a few minutes, otherwise sprinkle raw at the table)
• Add only half a teaspoon of salt to your Toscanini Celery Soup; the celery provides the rest. You can add to taste at the table. Salt high blood pressure.
  
• Liquidise if you like.

Variations

1. If your cholesterol is in good shape, add a teaspoon of cream and a tablespoon of finely chopped paprika (or red chilli, if you like it hot) to each plateful. I will often put in a peppadew with the onion.

2. A potato instead of half the rice.

Concerned about cholesterol? Foods that lower cholesterol ... it is far more sensible to ADD certain fruit and vegetables to your diet, than to sweat with removing butter and eggs. I am a testament to that with 'dangerously low' cholesterol, as I love to remark, but love butter and eggs; tongue in cheek of course.

The maestro

Arturo Toscanini, a cellist, (1867 – 1957) was one of the most brilliant and acclaimed conductors, renowned for his intensity, his restless perfectionism, his phenomenal ear for orchestral detail and his photographic memory; the maestro lives on in his music. 

He relentlessly resisted the fascism of Mussolini, eventually fleeing to the United States after being brutally beaten and humiliated in his homeland. His life is a testament of how dictatorships inevitably lose their finest assets; their best people, who move on to sunnier lands. Note well Robert Mugabe.

Broccoli soup

Celery is quite difficult to grow from seed, but its first cousins, the brassicas are just as tasty and perhaps even more nutritious; how to grow broccoli for example is not rocket science.

There's absolutely no reason not to turn your Toscanini celery soup into a kale or spinach dish if the former is out of season.

Toscanini wouldn't turn in his grave if he saw you enjoying chopped broccoli instead in his famed soup.

But from seedlings at the nursery, growing celery is a breeze; we grow it, planting in the late summer in our mild winter climate; we put them into orange or onion pockets; the roots are highly prized by the moles, as you can see from the graphic above.

The first lesson from how to grow broccoli is to select a branching variety; they go on bearing from months, the next best thing to Toscanini celery soup.

How to grow broccoli is not onerous, but it does require a large garden; I like the branching variety that goes on bearing edible florets for months. It can be used for a variation to Toscanini's soup. I believe a recipe should only form the basis for our own creativity; otherwise cooking becomes very dull like little kids colouring in lines, and never graduating to a free form of art.

Phytosterols

Both celery and broccoli are loaded with phytosterols, those food chemicals that you can't get enough if you have a fear of cancer and osteoarthritis. Toscanini celery soup rates high on our healthy choice foods list, even if made with mixed greens.

Phytosterols have a very similar structure to cholesterol too, competing at absorption sites in the gut and keeping the potentially dangerous LDLs down.

What are Phytosterols and why are they vital to our well being? Are you eating enough of them?

Osteoarthritis

If you love to garden then a few heads of broccoli and celery planted in late summer are dead easy. Both vegetables are loaded with magnesium too; there's plenty of research now confirming that a diet deficient in the mineral causes one of the forms of osteoarthritis; your heart too needs magnesium. Toscanini celery soup is not just delicious but beneficial to the whole body.

Chiropractic Help

Why a piece on Toscanini celery soup on a chiropractic help site you may well ask! So many of our patients are just plain tense and exhausted. If celery soup calmed the maestro's nerves, perhaps it'll calm yours too.

And then of course osteoarthritis comes into focus in at least a half of our patients. Chiropractic help adjustments of fixated joints helps to prevent immobilisation arthritis but celery has been proved to tackle the condition from a nutritional angle. Do anything and everything to prevent arthritis.

Fish oil too, and all foods rich in omega-3; freshly ground flax seed, walnuts and, if you can find them, genuine free range eggs. This chicken tractor design has revolutionised our garden, and we know the bright orange yolks are not fake.

The magnesium in celery and all sources of omega-3 are powerful tools in the fight against arthritis.

Both brown rice and celery are relatively low in choline yet, because the average Western person gets less than the recommended daily amount, it all helps. A deficiency like this causes serious diseases including birth defects and senile dementia.

• Early symptoms of arthritis home page...
• Read more about your Cholesterol Alcohol
• What is Chiropractic?
• Nerves on edge? Quite a tricky but fascinating page on tingling in arms and hands? and legs?