Too much salt in the soup doesn’t have to mean dinner is ruined. Julia Child’s easy approach can bring over-seasoned soup back into balance.

There are few kitchen heartbreaks quite like tasting a long-simmered soup and realizing—too late—that your hand was too heavy with the salt. What should have been satisfyingly warm and comforting turns sharp in an instant. But if there is anyone’s guidance we trust when it comes to calmly rescuing a nearly ruined meal, it’s Julia Child’s. Her cooking wisdom was never showy, never precious—just practical, generous, and grounded in the belief that most mistakes are fixable. And when it comes to soup that’s gotten too salty, Julia had a simple, quietly brilliant solution.

How does Julia Child make soup less salty?

Rather than masking the salt or diluting the flavor into oblivion, Julia Child’s method works by removing the excess salt from the soup using a raw, grated potato.

To correct an over-salted pot of soup, Julia recommends grating a raw potato directly into the soup and letting it simmer for several minutes. The potato absorbs both salt and liquid as it cooks. Once it’s done its work, you strain the potato out, taking the excess salt along with it. What remains is the soup you intended to make, restored to balance.

It’s a wonderfully old-fashioned tip that’s very Julia in its simplicity. It’s a quiet bit of kitchen magic that can solve a problem all of us have had at one point or another—no special tools or fancy ingredients required.

Why the Potato Trick Actually Works

A raw, grated potato behaves like a sponge in hot liquid. As it softens, it absorbs surrounding moisture along with dissolved salt. That’s what makes Julia’s fix so effective: Instead of trying to counteract salt with sweetness or fat, the potato physically pulls salt out of the broth. The only trade-off is that it will also soak up some of your soup’s liquid. If the texture thickens more than you’d like, simply add a splash of water, broth, milk or cream—whatever matches your soup’s base—to restore the right consistency.

What makes this trick especially lovely is how forgiving it feels. You don’t have to start over, dumping both your soup and your good mood down the sink. Julia Child believed that kitchen mistakes could be fixed and that they shouldn’t be fretted over—after all, no one else ever needs to know about them.

Related:

• Julia Child’s Depression-Era Hack for Storing Onions is Genius
• This Dessert Is So Good, It Made Julia Child Shed a Tear
• 11 of Grandma’s Best-Kept Soup Secrets