Soup

Soup is a primarily liquid food, generally served warm or hot – though it is sometimes served chilled – made by cooking or otherwise combining meat or vegetables with stock, milk, or water. According to '' The Oxford Companion to Food'' (OCF), "soup" is "the most general of the terms which apply to liquid savoury dishes";Davidson, p. 735 others include broth, bisque, consommé, potage and many more. Although most soups are savoury, sweet soups are familiar in some parts of Europe.

Soups have been made since prehistoric times, and have evolved over the centuries. Originally "sops" referred to pieces of bread covered with savoury liquid; gradually the term "soup" was transferred to the liquid itself. Soups are common to the cuisines of eastern and western countries and have been served at the grandest of banquets as well as in the humblest peasant homes.

Name

The term soup, or words like it, can be found in many languages. Similar terms in other languages include the Italian , the German , the Danish the Russian (pronounced "soup"), the Spanish and the Polish . Other terms embraced by "soup" include broth, bisque, consommé, potage and many more.

According to the lexicographer John Ayto, "the etymological idea underlying the word soup is that of 'soaking'". In his 2012 ''The Diner's Dictionary'' Ayto writes that the word dates back to an unrecorded post-classical Latin verb – "to soak", which was derived from the prehistoric Germanic root "sup–", which also produced the English "sup" and "supper". The term passed into Old French as , meaning a piece of bread soaked in liquid" and, by extension, "broth poured on to bread". The ancient conjunction of bread and soup still exists not only in the croutons often served with soup, and the slice of baguette and Gruyère floating on traditional French onion soup, but also in bread-based soups including the German ( black bread soup), the Russian and the Italian (tomato pulp). The records the term "" in French use from the twelfth century but adds that it is probably earlier. The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' records the use of the word in English in the fourteenth century: "Soppen nim wyn & sucre & make me an stronge soupe", but the first known cookery book in English, ''Forme of Cury'' , refers to several "broths", but not to soups.

'' The Oxford Companion to Food'' (OCF) comments that soups can stray, "over what is necessarily an imprecisely demarcated frontier", into the realm of stews. The Companion adds that this tendency is noticeable among fish soups such as bouillabaisse. The Hungarian goulash is regarded by many as a stew but by others, particularly in Hungary, as a soup ( Gulyás).

Prehistory

The cooking of soup can be dated back to the Upper Palaeolithic period when thermally altered rocks became commonplace in the archaeological record. Small boiling pits are present on the Gravettian site Pavlov VI. Some archaeologists conjecture that early humans employed hides and watertight baskets to boil water.

Ancient times and later

In 1988 the food writer M. F. K. Fisher commented, "It is impossible to think of any good meal, no matter how plain or elegant, without soup or bread in it. It is almost as hard to find any recorded menu, ancient or modern, without one or both". In her 2010 work ''Soup: A Global History'', Janet Clarkson writes that the ancient Romans had a great variety of soups. (On the Subject of Cooking), a collection of Roman recipes compiled in the fourth or fifth century from earlier manuscripts gives details of numerous ingredients, mostly vegetable.

After the fall of the Roman Empire soups continued to feature in European and Arab cuisines. Clarkson writes that the earliest known German cookery book, (A Book of Good Food) published in about 1345, includes recipes for many soups, including one made with beer and caraway seeds, another with leeks, almond milk and rice meal, others with carrots and almond milk or goose cooked in broth with garlic and saffron. The early fifteenth-century French book (From the Kitchen) has many recipes for potages and "sops" including several regional variants.

During the seventeenth century the soup itself, rather than the "sops" it contained, became seen as the most important element of the dish. One of the most famous cookery books of its time was Robert May's '' The Accomplisht Cook'' (1660). Clarkson comments that about a fifth of May's recipes are for soups of one kind or another.

In the eighteenth century, meals at grand European tables were still served in the style that had persisted since the Middle Ages, with successive courses of three or four dishes placed on the table simultaneously and then replaced by three or more contrasting dishes.Clarkson, p. 30 Soup was typically part of the first course. Exceptionally, at particularly grand dinners, a first course might consist of four different soups, succeeded by four dishes of fish and then four of meat. In the early nineteenth century a new style of dining became fashionable in Europe and elsewhere: – Russian-style service: dishes were served one at a time, usually beginning with soup.

China and Japan

In China and Japan, soup came to have a different place in meals. As in the west, there was a distinction between thick and thin soups, but the latter would often be treated as a beverage, to be drunk from the bowl rather than eaten with a spoon. In Japan miso soup became the best known of the thick type, with many variations on the basic theme of dashi, a stock made from kombu (edible seaweed) and dried fermented tuna, with miso (fermented soy bean) paste. Clarkson writes, "Miso soup is the traditional breakfast soup in the ordinary home, and the traditional end to a formal banquet".Clarkson, p. 106 In China, soups wholly unknown in the west were developed, including bird's nest and shark's fin soups. Snake soup continues to be an iconic tradition in Cantonese culture, and that of Hong Kong.

Another difference between east and west is that soup became a familiar breakfast dish in Asian countries, but not, according to Clarkson, in the west.

Europe and America

In the OCF Alan Davidson writes that although soup is now typically served as the first of several courses in western menus, in many places around the world substantial soups have historically been an entire meal for poorer people, particularly in rural areas. Many Russian peasants subsisted on rye bread and soup made from pickled cabbage. Charitable soup-kitchens preparing soup and supplying it to the needy, either free or at a very low charge, were known in the Middle East in the sixteenth century. From the late eighteenth century, soup-kitchens (in German , in French, ) were set up in Germany, England and France and elsewhere. In the 1840s the chef Alexis Soyer established a soup-kitchen in the East End of London to feed Huguenot silk weavers impoverished by cheap imports.Cowen, pp. 120–121 During the Irish famine, which began in 1845, he set up a kitchen in Dublin capable of feeding a thousand people an hour.Ray, Elizabeth
"Soyer, Alexis Benoît (1810–1858)"
''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press, 2011. In the United States soup-kitchens were set up in the 1870s. During the Great Depression, Al Capone established and sponsored a soup-kitchen in Chicago.

Since the sixteenth century Paris was known for its street vendors selling soup, and in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, Les Halles, the large food market, became known for its stalls selling onion soup with a substantial topping of grated cheese, put under a grill and served ." Dégustation : la soupe à l'oignon, bonne à en pleurer!"
''Le Parisien'', 21 January 2015. Retrieved 27 August 2023 According to one writer, the classic transcended class distinctions:

Other cuisines

'' The Oxford English Dictionary'' includes names of several soups from around the world: Indian cuisine includes rasam (sometimes called pepper-water), a thin, spicy soup, typically made with lentils, tomatoes, and seasonings including tamarind, pepper, and chillies. In Filipino cookery sinigang is a soup made with meat, shrimp, or fish and flavoured with a sour ingredient such as tamarind or guava. In the Caribbean and Latin America sancocho is a thick soup typically consisting of meat, tubers, and other vegetables. In Cajun cookery gumbo is a hearty soup (or stew) traditionally made from meat or shellfish with tomatoes, vegetables, herbs, and spices, thickened with okra. A Welsh soup, cawl, is typically made with lamb or beef together with vegetables including potatoes, swedes and carrots. Russian soups include schi (cabbage soup), solyanka (vegetable soup with meat or fish), rassolnik (pickled cucumber soup), and ukha (fish soup).

Modern times

In the western cuisine of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries there have been and are numerous soups. Auguste Escoffier divided them into two main types:
* Clear soups, which include plain and garnished consommés
* Thick soups, which comprise the purées, veloutés, and creams
He added, "A third class, which is independent of either of the above, in that it forms part of plain, household cookery, embraces vegetable soups and garbures or gratinéd soups. But in important dinners – by this I mean rich dinners – only the first two classes are recognised".

Louis Saulnier's , first published in 1914, contains six pages of details of (clear soups), two pages on (moistened with water, milk or thin white stock), eight pages on (soups thickened with egg yolks) and (thickened with double cream), as well as a further three pages on fifty-three – foreign soups – including bortsch from Russia, clam chowder from New England, cock-a-leekie from Scotland, minestrone from Italy, mock turtle from England, and mulligatawny from British India.

The French distinction between clear and thick soups is echoed in other languages: in German and ; in Italian and ; and in Spanish and .

Elizabeth David comments in '' French Provincial Cooking'' (1969), "No doubt because the tin and the package have become so universal, people are astonished by the true flavours of a well-balanced home-made soup and demand more helpings if only to make sure that their noses and palates are not deceiving them". In their '' Mastering the Art of French Cooking'' (1961), Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle and Julia Child write:

Cold soups

Cold soups are a particular variation on the traditional soup. Two well-known chilled soups are the Franco-American vichyssoise and the Spanish '' gazpacho''. ''The Oxford English Dictionary'' defines the former as "A soup made with potatoes, leeks, and cream, usually served chilled", and the latter as "A cold Spanish vegetable soup consisting of onions, cucumbers, pimentos, etc., chopped very small with bread and put into a bowl of oil, vinegar, and water".

Sweet soups

Fruit soups are well known in Germany and Nordic countries. Although they may sometimes be served at the beginning of a meal they are sweet dishes. Davidson instances , also known as , a red berry soup popular in Denmark, other parts of Scandinavia and Germany, sitruunakeitto, a creamy lemon soup from Finland, and the Middle Eastern khoshab, made with dried fruits. Other fruits used to make sweet soups include apples, blueberries, cherries, gooseberries, rhubarb and rose-hips.

Sour soups

Davidson mentions a category, "sour soups", which are important in northern, eastern and central Europe. Some have a fermented beer base or use Sauerkraut, others are soured with vinegar, pickled beetroot, lemon or yoghurt. Examples include Chorba.

Portable, tinned and dried soups

Food preservation has, in Clarkson's phrase, "always been a preoccupation of the human animal",Clarkson, p. 67 allowing food to be kept for long periods. Early efforts to do this for soup resulted in cubes of highly concentrated meat stock that set to a solid consistency: for a bowl of soup it was only necessary to break off a piece and dissolve it in hot water. By the eighteenth century, cookery books gave recipes for such " portable soup" under many names; Clarkson lists "veal glew", "cake soup", "cake gravey", "broth cakes", "solid soop", "portmanteau pottage", "pocket soup", "carry soup and "soop always in readiness". The Royal Navy victualled its ships with portable soup from about 1757.

In 1810 an English inventor called Peter Durand was granted a patent for the first tin can for soup. The first commercial canning factory opened in England in 1813; it had a capacity of only six cans an hour; each can was cut by hand, filled and the lid soldered on individually. With advances in technology the canning of food had expanded by the end of the century and companies such as Heinz were promoting their soups as gourmet products indistinguishable from home-made versions. In 1897 Heinz's rival Campbell's introduced condensed canned soups, to be diluted with water to produce double the volume. The first five soups in Campbell's range were tomato, chicken, oxtail, consommé, and vegetable. According to the food historian Reay Tannahill, tomato soup did not become popular in the US or Britain until then.

Drying is one of the oldest methods of preserving food, and in the nineteenth century Soyer praised commercially dried vegetables as a good ingredient of soldiers' soup during the Crimean War.Clarkson, p. 76 Dried soups remained in military use into the 1950s, but it was not until the mid-twentieth century that manufacturers began extensively marketing them for domestic use. ''The Good Nutrition Guide'' (2008) commented:

Subsequently, some manufacturers have experimented with reduced-salt packet soups. A trial in France in 2012 found that reducing salt in chicken noodle soup by more than thirty per cent did not affect consumers' liking for the product.Willems, Astrid A. ''et al''. "Effects of Salt Labelling and Repeated In-Home Consumption on Long-Term Liking of Reduced-Salt Soups", ''Public Health Nutrition'' 17.5 (2014), p. 1130

Gallery

Image:Tom Yum Soup.JPG, Tom yum
File:Saigon_style_chicken_phở.jpg, Chicken phở
File:Seafood chowder.jpg, Seafood chowder
File:Borscht with bread.jpg, Borscht
File:Okroshka, Russian okroshka, Rostov-on-Don, Russia.jpg, Okroshka
File:Vegetable beef barley soup.jpg, Vegetable beef barley soup
File:Chicken Noodle Soup.jpg, Chicken pasta soup
File:Tomato soup and grilled cheese.JPG, Chunky tomato soup
File:Pea-soup-with-tortilla.jpg, A thick pea soup garnished with a tortilla accent
File:Crème d'asperge à la truffe.jpg, Cream of asparagus soup
File:Reindeer cheese soup.jpg, Cheese soup
File:Algerian_Food_(12).jpg, Algerian soup

Notes, references and sources

Notes

References

Sources

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See also

* Lists of foods
* List of bean soups
* List of fish and seafood soups
* Soup and sandwich
* Soup spoon
* Stone Soup
* Three grand soups

Further reading

* Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe. ''Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food'' (2002). New York: Free Press
* Jennifer Harvey Lang, ed., ''Larousse Gastronomique'', American Edition (1988). New York: Crown Publishers
* Morton, Mark. ''Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities'' (2004). Toronto: Insomniac Press
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World cuisine
Ancient dishes
Types of food