The poor lighting in our home obscures the delicate light green shade of the soup. Hazelnut crumbs for garnish are only one of many options.
Here below is the magic base of this soup which later inspired our favorite soup, cream of chestnut soup: onion, leek and celery sauteed in butter/oil.
And here is the 2020 almost vegan version where at Ani's sister nora's suggestion, we omitted the milk products and could not really taste their absence. Almost vegan since ani started with a stick of butter instead of the olive oil called for in the recipe she did not read.
Better lighting and focus this time around, but let's face it, cream soup is not very photogenic without artistic swirls of contrasting color garnishing stuff (like this fancy Mark Bittman mushroom soup). Freshly ground black pepper was the lazy route here. And bob's tacky decades old CorelleWare does not help.
Here is the fancy approach photo in case the NYTimes paywall keeps you from seeing Mark's work.
