If Mark Scott is as good a soup maker as he is prognosticator of international soccer, a whole bunch of people could well be tucking into a bowls of black bean and chicken soup on July 13.
Why? Scott, executive chef at Legend's Pub for the better part of a decade, is ramping up efforts in his kitchen to produce soups synonymous with the nations playing in the 2014 World Cup Finals - the quadrennial feast of football which starts next month in Brazil.
On each game day, beginning June 12, Scott will be serving up a soup from one country, right through to the final on July 13.
Plus, he's in the midst of releasing a self-published recipe book packed with 33 soups representing each nation.
While there are 32 teams participating, Scott produced two recipes for Spain to mark that country's accomplishment of winning the European Championships twice (2008 and 2012), and the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
The recipe book, The World Cup of Soups, builds on Scott's successful efforts during the 2010 tournament, when he kicked off the soup for each soccer nation concept.
"The response back then was insane," said Scott, who spent about 30 years playing soccer in leagues across the Lower Mainland, Kelowna and Calgary, much of it as a hard-rock central defender, then a goalie before knee injuries put him on the touchline permanently.
"We had people emailing and phoning in, asking what the soup was for that day. And they were lined up waiting to get in to the place to watch the games and have a bowl of soup.
"We ended up selling 15 litres of soup during the hot summer days, which is not exactly the type of thing for that time of year." One of the biggest challenges in producing the recipes was scaling them back for home kitchens, and making sure the ingredients for some of the more exotic dishes were available in the region.
"When I'm making 15 litres of soup in the pub's kitchen, I don't even measure," Scott said. "I've been doing this kind of thing for so long, it comes by nature."
Conducting the research was an eye-opening experience, Scott said, adding he's modernized some traditional recipes, "giving people the option of making a cream soup without using flour to thicken it if they have an intolerance to gluten."
As for locating some ingredients, some proved harder than others, including Nigeria, with Scott having trouble finding the uziza leaf (also known as pepper leaf) for the okra, chicken and uziza leaf soup. After some Internet-based research, he finally found it at a Granville Island shop.
And when it came to Ghana's nikraka with fufu dumplings, Scott was almost stumped.
"What the heck were fufu dumplings?" he said, adding it required some extra research before he ended up making them himself.
So, if Canada ever made a return to the World Cup Finals - the one and only appearance was in 1986 in Mexico; the men's team is currently ranked a dismal 110th in the world - what soup would represent the Great White North? "It's not something I've really had to put much thought into," Scott said chuckling. "But it would probably be a salmon and corn chowder."
The recipe book is available on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and Scott is trying to get it on the shelves of Vancouver locations of Chapters, and Black Bond Books.
"I'm also going to be selling it out of the pub, as well as through the Rick Hansen Foundation website (rickhansen. com) and its World Cup pool," Scott said.
As for what will be on the top of the two-soup menu for the July 13 final match at the legendary Maracanã stadium in Rio De Janeiro, Scott's black bean and chicken soup for host nation Brazil is what he believes will be the winner with Spain's caldo gallego - a white bean dish with cured ham and potatoes - the runner up.
"I pick Brazil and Spain to be in the final," Scott said. "With Brazil, they have a young team that, even with the heavy weight of expectations from a whole nation, will probably win."
