Soup

Soup is the nutritious liquid obtained by boiling meat or vegetables in stock. It is generally served warm or hot.

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HISTORY

Soup was consumed in the Mediterranean area by prehistoric man with the main ingredient being Hippopotamus bones.

At first soups were cooked by dropping hot stones into the liquid. Eventually man developed pots which could withstand the direct heat of a fire.

Remains of ceramic pots recently found by archaeologists suggest that the Japanese were eating fish soup 15,000 years ago.

Black soup was a standard meal for Spartan warriors made from boiled pigs' legs, blood, salt and vinegar. After tasting it one commentator remarked "Now I know why the Spartans do not fear death."

The Vikings fed their wounded soldiers a strong onion soup to help gauge how deep a stomach wound was. After a few minutes, they would smell the wound and if they could smell the onion soup, they knew the wound was too deep and the soldier could not be saved.

In the French court of Louis XI (1423-1483), the fine ladies lived mainly on soup because they believed that excessive chewing would cause them to develop premature facial wrinkles.

The word 'soup' does not occur in any of William Shakespeare's plays or sonnets.

Soup (William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1865)

Started by George Baxter as a village store in Fochabers, Moray, Scotland, the firm Baxters, now known for its tinned soups, was established in 1868. One rare failure for the company was its canned porridge, which was discontinued after just a few months on the shelves in the 1960s.

Thomas Edison would give potential employees a bowl of soup during the interview, if they salted or peppered the soup before tasting it they wouldn't get the job. This was to test whether the employees had analytical minds and didn't make assumptions.

TYPES OF SOUP

The bouillon cube was once a common snack food in early America. Beef or veal stock was boiled down until it reached a hard jelly texture. The hard cakes didn't spoil, and trappers and hunters nibbled on them when tramping along on long journeys during the 1700s.

Industrially produced bouillon cubes, compressed, concentrated cubes of dehydrated meat or vegetable stock, were introduced commercially by the Swiss flour manufacturer Julius Maggi in 1908. He produced them so the poor living in city slums (who cannot afford meat) would have a cheap method for making nutritious soup.

Bouillon cubes By Rainer Z

King Louis XV of France (1710 –1774) was so afraid of being poisoned that he had several servants taste his food before he ate it. By the time the soup reached him, it was cold. He liked it so much that he had it served cold from then on. That (supposedly) is why the creamy French potato soup, vichysoisse, is always served chilled.

It is claimed that King Louis XV of returned late one night to his hunting lodge, and all that was on hand was onions, butter and champagne. He mixed them together, cooked it and thus invented the first French onion soup.

In France Oxtail soup was created as a result of slaughterhouses sending the Ox's hides to the tanneries without cleaning them, leaving on the tails. A French noble asked for a tail, which was willingly given to him, and he created the first oxtail soup. The new soup was so popular that the tanners started charging for the tails because of the demand for them.

Southern Oxtail Soup. By Roboscreech at the English language Wikipedia

In 19th-century Britain, ‘mock-turtle’ soup was often made from cow foetuses.

The Kai Mayfair, London restaurant set a record for offering the world’s most expensive commercially available bowl of soup in 2005 at $190 (£108 at the time). The soup, known as Buddha Jumps Over The Wall, contained shark fin, sea snails, Japanese flower mushroom, pork and ginseng.

Italian "wedding soup" comes from the Italian language phrase "minestra maritata ("married soup")," which is a reference to the flavor produced by the combination or "marriage" of greens and the broth.

 Czernina is a Polish soup that's made with duck blood and other ingredients. Traditionally, this soup was served to men who were rejected after asking for permission to wed their significant other.

FUN SOUP FACTS

The cafeteria for the US Senate has served bean soup every day using the same recipe for over a century. Excluding a single day in 1943 where there weren't enough ingredients due to war rationing.

The Wattana Panich restaurant in Bangkok has been constantly cooking and serving from the same soup since the mid 1970s, a form of "perpetual stew."

In 2007, a French court ruled that it is not discriminatory to offer pork soup to the homeless, after a soup kitchen serving it was banned as discriminating against Jews and Muslims.

Women are two or three times more likely than men to order soup in a restaurant.

In China and Japan, it is considered polite to slurp your soup. It means your meal is too good to be graceful.

By law, all bars in Indiana are required to sell soup.

Sources Daily Express, Daily Mail, Food For Thought by Ed Pearce