Is it too early to start talking about soup? Should I come back later in the autumn when the weather starts nipping at our ankles a bit more? But I really don’t want to wait. I need soup now. And I know I’m not the only one.

Right now, in every neighbourhood cafe across the land, someone is walking in and asking the boss, “Are the soups back on yet?”

I emphasise cafes rather than restaurants because not a lot of fancy chefs do soups anymore. Not proper ones. They’ll put a puree of sea urchin and dandelion in a little porcelain jug and have the waiter pour it over the Moreton Bay bug in front of you at the table, but that’s not soup.

And fewer chefs seem to be making their own huge pots of stocks any more, gravitating, instead, towards the instant umami (depth of savoury flavour) of on-trend Japanese ingredients such as dashi, kombu, seaweed and miso.

Stock is the ultimate waste disposal unit (in a good way). If chefs have whole beef, pork or chicken carcasses delivered, and break them down themselves, they end up with the bones and wherewithal to make their own stocks.

If they have their meat delivered already butchered and filleted, there are no bones and no stock.

And nobody, but nobody, makes a consomme any more. Consomme is broth that went to finishing school – simmered with a raft of egg white and other counterintuitive ingredients that gather all the impurities together in a storm cloud that can then be scooped off the top, leaving the broth crystal clear and sparkling.

But the soup itself is often just the vehicle. French onion soup would just be a beef broth, stringy with onions, if it weren’t for that slab of melting cheese-on-toast. (Come on, we know we only order it for the cheese-on-toast.)

There has to be something for the soup to carry – like the prawns in a tom yum, or the flat rice noodles in a Vietnamese pho – otherwise, you need a snack on the side to turn it into a meal.

In the meantime, I’ve seen a solitary cloud up in the sky. And did the breeze just get that little bit cooler? I’m calling it. It’s soup season.