Happy New Year! We’ll be returning to Hulu’s Castle Rock for the second season soon, but as the new year gets started, it’s chilly where I am, which feels like an ideal time to circle back to Castle Rock Kitchen for some of Theresa Carle-Sanders’ hearty King-inspired soup recipes, which include “Better-Than-Canned Mulligatawny” (Insomnia), Potato and Collard Soup (The Long Walk), Sloop (Revival), Poor Man’s Soup (“The Reach”), and Haddock Chowdah for Old Men (“Gray Matter”). 

Soup and horror are a thought-provoking combination. Horror is often isolating and overwhelming, whether we’re talking about supernatural threats, the end of the world, or human cruelty. But in King’s fiction, there is almost always some comfort to be found, usually in family, friends, and basic human decency. When the Torrances are trapped in the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1977), for example, Danny finds some comfort in Dick Halloran’s kitchen with his mother, even as the snow rages outside and his father starts to lose his grip on reality. In The Stand (1978; revised and expanded 1990), the end of the world is a terrifying and dangerous place, but many of the survivors find one another and form supportive communities and families that care for one another, gathered around light in the darkness and often, a shared table. . 

The first Castle Rock Kitchen recipe I tackled in the new year is Carle-Sanders’ “Sloop,” inspired by King’s Revival (2014), which is a riff on Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic Frankenstein. The soup itself is of little consequence in the story, though the eating habits of the characters are significant: while Jamie and Astrid eat soup and salad, the obsessive experimenter Charles Jacobs eats only “a single piece of toast and half a cup of tea” (315). There is something warming in Jamie and Astrid’s reunion after so many years apart, even if the experiments Jacobs is doing are dangerous and terrifying. The other telling detail is reflected in Carle-Sanders’ naming of the recipe: after administering the electrical current to Astrid, when Jacobs asks her what she had for dinner the previous night, her response is “Sloop. Sloop and salad,” before she reestablishes a firmer handle on reality and her cognitive faculties, correcting herself with “Soup. Soup and salad” (325, emphasis original). 

Carle-Sanders’ recipe for “Sloop” is hearty and filled with layers of flavor. Jacobs doesn’t eat meat, telling Jamie “It creates fatty deposits in the brain” (309), but Carle-Sanders’ recipe includes savory crisped bacon, which complements the corn, potatoes, celery, and spices. It is well-spiced and creamy, courtesy of some heavy cream added in in the final simmering stages. There is a lot to fear in Revival, from Jacobs’ obsession to what waits on the other side of the veil, but old friends and a good, thick soup offer some comfort in the darkness. 

[Citations are from the 2014 hardcover edition of Revival.] 

Check out Castle Rock Kitchen here.