The Creamy Cold Potato Soup Martha Stewart Has Loved Since Childhood

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Martha Stewart has continued to make herself an au courant lifestyle expert for the better part of four decades, doling out advice to home entertaining enthusiasts on everything from the perfect fall table setting to her favorite foods. Espousing a "make it beautiful, but simple" aesthetic, Stewart is known for classic dishes that are straightforward, but feel refined, like her creamy cold potato soup, featured in her most recent cookbook "Martha: The Cookbook: 100 Favorite Recipes, with Lessons and Stories from My Kitchen."

Stewart's potato soup is extremely easy to make and is actually only loosely a "soup" as the broth, if you will, is simply fresh buttermilk that is poured around a hand-picked mound of steamed and peeled small potatoes and sauteed onions. The magic of this recipe is the luscious texture of the freshly steamed potatoes (she uses Peruvian blues as well as yellow and red baby potatoes) and gently cooked onions against the cold creaminess of the tangy buttermilk.

Marth Stewart's potato soup is satisfying in large part because of its varying textures and temperatures that keep you going back in for more. She tops her soup with a sprig of fresh dill, but you could also finish your soup with chives, mushrooms, or even leeks. If you are favoring the leek angle, another famous potato soup may be calling your name. Julia Child brought the classic French potato soup vichyssoise right into American living rooms on an early episode of her show "The French Chef." Though it sounds daunting, it is another easy potato soup riff, consisting merely of pureed potatoes, leeks, and water, and also famously served chilled.

At the heart of both Stewart's potato soup and Child's vichyssoise are fork-tender potatoes that only take about twenty minutes to achieve. The potatoes are the star of the show here and farm or garden fresh gems are ideal. If you are caught out without fresh potatoes and are craving potato soup, you could always riff on the potatoes and onion flavors by using frozen potatoes as a base. A warm version is bound to be most appealing if using frozen potatoes, a la a baked potato soup studded with cheese, bacon, and chives.