Chris and Lorraine Wallace on Soup, Family, and How to Make Both Delicious

During this past Sunday’s segment of Fox News Sunday devoted to “power players,” host Chris Wallace profiled his wife Lorraine, a task that had him sweating over the script more than usual. In it, he said, “We’ve been introducing you to power players for the last seven years, and while I admire them all, this is the first one I love.”
 
Lorraine had no clue such sentiment was coming, and her eyes had welled up when she heard it. Ditto Imus, who said today, “I thought that was just about the sweetest thing I’d ever seen anybody do.”
 
This veritable mushfest between Imus and the Wallaces, and between the Wallaces themselves, continued for another 15 minutes or so, with talk of blended families, Chris’s sleeping habits, and Lorraine’s book Mr. Sunday’s Soups, in no particular order.
 
Between the two of them, Chris and Lorraine have six children, four of whom were between the ages of seven and ten and living with them when the two met at a party nearly 15 years ago, or were set up on a date, depending on who tells the story.
 
“It was really hard,” Chris said of combining the two families, noting the tendency for both sibling and stepsibling rivalries to occur. “I don’t know how, I guess it’s soup, but we all ended up loving each other, and it’s really a family.”
 
Imus was thrilled to hear that, like most families, this one has endured its share of strife, and wondered why soup played such a prominent role in solidifying the Wallace family bond, as Mr. Sunday’s Soups attests.
 
“I would come home, tired and hungry,” said Chris, who returns from his Fox News Sunday taping at around 11:30 a.m. Their son Remick, a baseball player, would just be starting his day, about to head out to a game. “Lorraine would sit us down for 20 minutes of soup—homemade, organic, local, healthy, oftentimes vegetarian soup.”
 
The concoction available on set this morning, baby arugula, zucchini, potatoes and cauliflower in a vegetable broth, sounded delicious, but Imus refused the offer, intent on figuring out why Lorraine decided to make soup and not, say, bacon and eggs.
 
“He wanted a warm, nutritious meal that would full him up,” she said of her husband. “And this was my answer.” Following his soup, Chris, who rises at 5 o’clock in the morning on Sundays to prepare for his show and is overcome with exhaustion by 11:30, would head upstairs with his dog Winston for a nap.
 
Lorraine ticked off some other soup recipes in Mr. Sunday’s Soups, which includes pictures and personal stories from the entire Wallace family. “There are 83 recipes in the book, a soup for every season,” she said. Summer, for instance, would feature a gazpacho, while winter tends toward hearty lentils.
 
Chris called Lorraine’s cooking “sensational,” but she humbly claimed that she’s just a “home cook,” as is Deirdre Imus, whose husband lamented today that she’s “too busy acting like a man” to actually cook anymore.
 
“Someone has to,” Chris jumped in, then explained why he values Lorraine’s opinion of his performance each week on Fox News Sunday more than anybody else’s.
 
“In this business, how many people are there you know who have only your best interests are heart, have no other agenda other than you doing great?” he said. “That’s the way Lorraine is about me, and I like to think that’s the way I am about her.”
 
Even just a casual observer of today’s interview with Chris and Lorraine Wallace would pick up on their admiration and love for one another, as Imus did, calling their relationship “a charming vision.” A casual observer, however, have found a different way to conclude the segment. 
 
“It’s such a wonderful, sweet story with these people,” he said. “And their dopey book, and the soup.”
 
-Julie Kanfer