The $4 ingredient that upgraded every soup I make

For years my homemade soup tasted like a slightly worse version of the same soup at a restaurant, and I could not figure out the gap. It was not the recipe. It was a jar of anchovy paste that had been sitting in my fridge door, mostly ignored, since a pasta recipe I made once.

A half teaspoon, melted into the aromatics before anything else goes in, does not taste like fish. It tastes like the soup suddenly has a backbone — the savory depth restaurants get from hours of stock reduction, in one spoonful, in four dollars, lasting months in the fridge.

It works in tomato soup, in bean soups, in anything with a red or brown base. It does not belong in anything delicate or cream-based, where it will just taste like fish. The rule I use: if the soup already has garlic and onion doing the aromatic work, anchovy paste has a job to do too.

I have stopped mentioning it when people ask for the recipe, because half of them make a face. The other half ask where I have been hiding this soup their whole lives.