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When you can be bothered to meal prep or cook a proper meal, there's nothing more comforting than a warm bowl of soup and a piece of crusty bread to dip in. Having a can of soup in the cupboard is always wise.

If a shop-bought soup is a little lacklustre, a recipe developer for Simply Recipes has shared how she transforms the canned food into a "£15 bistro lunch". It's all thanks to a very common ingredient that's no stranger to our fridges. You won't need a lot, just a splash, after you've cooked the soup.

When working in a posh Manhattan restaurant in the mid-2000s, one customer asked if the soup of the day - a tomato basil soup - included heavy cream, more commonly known as double cream over here.

The restaurant's chef told her: "Any soup worth eating is made with heavy cream."

It was a lesson that the recipe developer and food writer hasn't forgotten. Molly wrote: "There were a few more colourful words in that reply that aren't fit for print, but needless to say, I haven't forgotten it. To this day, this stuck with me: The best soups contain heavy cream."

While not every soup needs the addition of dairy, Molly argued that soups such as tomato, butternut squash, carrot, red pepper, potato and leek, and sweet potato all benefit from it. Adding double cream helps to "round out" the flavour of the soup, as well as "softening sharp edges, and giving the soup a silkier texture".

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Double cream can also be used to balance out acidity levels, particularly in tomato soup. This can simply be resolved by adding a splash of double cream.

She continued: "That's why, whenever I lean on canned tomato soup-or make a quick version from scratch-I always finish it with just a splash of cream to balance the acidity and add a little richness."

However, the recipe developer advised that the cream should be at room temperature, not cold, when added to soup. This is to prevent the soup from curdling.

Add the double cream after the soup has been warmed up. The soup shouldn't be heated or boiled once the cream has been added to the mix.

Molly said: "The addition won't make the soup creamy; instead, the soup will become silkier and richer, which will make it taste just like the $15 bowl of soup I used to serve with tears in my eyes, counting down the minutes until my shift ended."