Soup

Lore & Background

Soup has been around since prehistoric times, starting with grains and herbs before people added legumes, vegetables, meat, or fish. The word “soup” originally referred to “sops”—pieces of bread soaked in savory liquid—but later came to mean the liquid itself. You can find soup in every continent’s cuisine, served at fancy banquets and in humble homes alike.

For many poor communities, soup has been a main source of food, and soup kitchens have helped feed the hungry during hard times. The term “soup” or similar words appear in many languages. According to lexicographer John Ayto, the word’s core idea is “soaking.” The earliest English use of “sop” dates from 1340, and the Oxford English Dictionary records “soup” in English by the fourteenth century.

The first known English cookbook, The Forme of Cury, mentions “broths” but not soups. The Oxford Companion to Food notes that soups can blur into stews, as with bouillabaisse and Hungarian goulash. Food writer Harold McGee says soups and sauces are so alike that soups are mainly distinguished by being less intense in flavor, allowing them to be eaten as a meal rather than just an accent.

Reader's Guide

Before the invention of boiling in water, cooking was limited to simple heating and roasting. The making of soup or something akin has been dated by some writers back to the Upper Palaeolithic (between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago). Some archaeologists conjecture that early humans employed hides and watertight baskets to boil liquids. According to a study by the academic Garritt C. Van Dyk, the first soup may have been made by Neanderthals, boiling animal bones and drinking the broth.

Archaeological evidence for bone broths has been found in sites from Egypt to China. 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.' Methods of making soup evolved from one culture to another. The first soups were made from grains and herbs; later, peas, beans, other vegetables, pasta, meat or fish were added.

Ancient times and later

In her 2010 work Soup: A Global History, Janet Clarkson writes that the ancient Romans had a great variety of soups. In European and Arab cuisines soups continued to feature after the fall of the Roman Empire. During the seventeenth century the soup itself, rather than the 'sops' it contained, became seen as the most important element of the dish. The Huangdi Neijing, a Chinese medicinal text, describes the preparation of soups and clear liquids by steaming rice, and recommends soups as medicine.

In the eighteenth century, meals at grand European tables were still served with successive courses; soup was typically part of the first course. In the early nineteenth century a new style of dining became fashionable: Russian-style service, usually beginning with soup. 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.

Soup for the poor

Charitable soup-kitchens were known in the Middle East in the sixteenth century. From the late eighteenth century, soup-kitchens were set up in Germany, France, England 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. During the Irish famine, which began in 1845, he set up a kitchen in Dublin capable of feeding a thousand people an hour.