Claypot Chickpea Soup

The splendor of this soup is its straight, intense flavor, achieved by using simple ingredients and traditional methods. Though the soup is rustic, the methods used are very precise.

“For a good Sifniot chickpea soup, you absolutely need a crunchy yellow onion that squirts when you cut it,” my Greek-born friend Daphne Zepos counsels, after giving me a whole litany of other do’s and don’ts, including the proviso that I use rainwater from a cistern and cook my chickpeas in a clay pot