Martha Stewart's Sweet Soup Upgrade Is A Loving Nod To Her Mom

Culinary personality Martha Stewart derives cooking inspiration from all corners of her life, from the seasonal outputs of her home garden to the tried-and-true recipes of her own family members. Among Stewart's most notable culinary influences, her mother, Martha Kostyra, has passed down ample kitchen advice applicable to dishes of all kinds. When it comes to chicken soup, for instance, Stewart has employed one particular mom-approved upgrade: "My mother always put parsnip in hers," Stewart explains in a cooking tutorial posted to the Martha Stewart Facebook page. "Parsnips add a subtle sweetness to the chicken soup. Very, very flavorful — I love it a lot."

As evidenced by Stewart's broth recipe, the food and lifestyle guru follows her mother's lead and chops up exactly one parsnip for an easy, but effective, twist. The recipe at its most basic, per Stewart's website, never singles out parsnips as a requisite ingredient, but Stewart's video praises the vegetable as a worthwhile addition. In fact, the use of parsnips is crucial, not because the ingredient remains in the end soup — Stewart actually suggests adding fresh vegetables instead — but because the root vegetable flavors the broth from the get-go.

Mother knows best. Before there was the iconic duo of Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg, there was Martha Stewart and her own mom. That familial partnership has inspired Stewart's cooking over the years, notably introducing parsnips as a core broth ingredient alongside the likes of carrots and onions. "These vegetables are the vegetables for the flavoring," Stewart says in the 2021 cooking video on her Facebook page. "And they really won't be the vegetables that you will eat. These will be diminished in flavor by the time you finish cooking the soup, and you'll want to put fresh vegetables in at the last minute into the clear stock."

Beyond Stewart's broth recipe, parsnips have long proven themselves a delicious and delightful soup ingredient, whether they're taking on a starring role or acting as a supporting character. Parsnip-based soups range from creamy, spicy, vegetable-packed concoctions to sweeter renditions with apples and shallots. As soup season is, indeed, always in season, you can take a page out of Martha Stewart's mother's playbook and incorporate the root vegetable into your favorite global soup.