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= Soup =
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Introduction
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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', "soup" is the main generic term for
liquid savoury dishes; others include broth, bisque, consommé, potage
and many more.
The consistency of soups varies from thin to thick: some soups are
light and delicate; others are so substantial that they verge on being
stews. 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. The first soups were made from grains and herbs; later,
legumes, other vegetables, meat or fish were added. 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 all continents and have been served at the grandest of
banquets as well as in the poorest peasant homes. Soups have been the
primary source of nourishment for poor people in many places; in times
of hardship soup-kitchens have provided sustenance for the hungry.
Some soups are found in recognisably similar forms in the cuisines of
many countries and regions - several from Asia have become familiar in
the west and chicken soups and legume soups are known round the world;
others remain almost entirely exclusive to their region of origin.
Name
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The term soup, or words like it, can be found in many languages.
Similar terms include the Italian , the German , the Danish , the
Russian (pronounced "soup"), the Spanish and the Polish . According
to 'The Oxford Companion to Food', "soup" is "the most general of the
terms which apply to liquid savoury dishes"; other terms embraced by
"soup" include broth, bisque, bouillon, 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 earliest recorded use in English of "sop" in
the first sense dates from 1340. 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". The first known cookery book in
English, 'The 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 (). The food writer Harold McGee contrasts soups with sauces in
'On Food and Cooking', commenting that they can be so similar that
soups may only be distinguished as less intensely flavoured,
permitting them to be "eaten as a food in themselves, not an accent."
Prehistory
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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.
Ancient times and later
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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". 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. 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.
In European and Arab cuisines soups continued to feature after the
fall of the Roman Empire. Clarkson writes that the earliest known
German cookery book, the (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.
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.
Soup for the poor
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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, 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.
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. In the same period the Salvation Army ran
similar operations elsewhere in the US and in Canada, Australia and
Britain.
Asia
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In Asian countries soup became a familiar breakfast dish, but has not,
according to Clarkson, done so in the west. 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". Ramen, a noodle soup, popular in Japan and
latterly internationally, is documented only from the second half of
the nineteenth century.
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. In
China, rat soup is considered the equal of oxtail soup.
Indian cuisine includes (sometimes called pepper-water), a thin,
spicy soup, typically made with lentils, tomatoes, and seasonings
including tamarind, pepper, and chillies. In Thai cuisine are soups:
the most popular are made with prawns and made from galangal,
chicken and coconut milk. is a Vietnamese soup, usually made from
beef stock and spices with noodles and thinly sliced beef or chicken
added. In Filipino cookery is a soup made with meat, shrimp, or fish
and flavoured with a sour ingredient such as tamarind or guava; also
from the Philippines is , a goat soup. The soups of Indonesia include
(chicken), (shrimp with rice vermicelli) and (crab). is a soup
served in the Maldives, with chunks of tuna in it.
Two soups from Armenia are a cucumber and yoghurt soup called , and ,
containing lamb and fruit; is a dumpling soup from Azerbaijan;
Tibetan cooking includes 'tsamsuk', made from grains, butter, soya and
cheese. An Iranian summer soup, , is made with yoghurt, cucumber, and
mint. Turkish is made from the meat from animal heads and feet. , one
of the oldest traditional Turkish soups, is made by mixing and
fermenting yoghurt, cereal flours and a variety of cooked vegetables,
producing a soup with a sour and acidic tang and a yeasty flavour.
Also from Turkey is , a yoghurt soup with rice or barley. Like chicken
soup it has curative properties ascribed to it by some.
Europe
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From the sixteenth century onwards, Paris was known for its street
vendors selling soup, and in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, , the large
central food market, became known for its stalls selling onion soup
with a substantial topping of grated cheese, put under a grill and
served . This transcended class distinctions, becoming the breakfast
of the - the workers responsible for transporting the goods - and a
restorative for the party people leaving the cabarets of Paris late at
night.
The many cuisines of Europe have a wide range of soups. Among the
soups of Italy are , and , respectively a vegetable broth, consommé
with poached eggs, and a meat broth with eggs and cheese. From Belgium
there are - a pea and bean soup - and , a vegetable soup with fine
vermicelli and milk. Bulgarian cuisine includes , a cold yoghurt and
cucumber soup. Dutch soups include - a split pea soup - and , a brown
bean soup eaten with rye bread and bacon. A soup from the Faeroe
Islands is , made with dried mutton. , is a German split pea soup with
pig's ear. , a Latvian fish soup incorporates whole pieces of cooked
fish with potato; The Finnish kesäkeitto is a light summer soup of
seasonal vegetables cooked in milk and water; the Swedish is a meat
and vegetable soup; the Norwegian is cauliflower soup with egg yolks
and cream. , from Luxembourg, is made with pork offal, and finished
with prunes soaked in local white wine.
Maltese soups include ("widow's soup"), made with green and white
vegetables and garnished with a poached egg and cheese, and a light
fish soup flavoured with garlic and marjoram. Two soups from Poland
are , a crayfish and beetroot soup, served chilled and , yellow-pea
soup with barley. Portuguese soups include (chicken) and (potato and
cabbage). Cullen skink (smoked haddock soup) and nettle soup are of
Scottish origin. A Welsh soup, cawl, is typically made with lamb or
beef together with vegetables including potatoes, swedes and carrots.
Slovenian cuisine includes , a meat and vegetable soup. Russian soups
include (cabbage soup), (vegetable soup with meat or fish),
(pickled cucumber soup), and (fish soup).
Africa
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Arab typically contains meat and oats; Egyptian food includes , a
soup of jute leaves and meat. The Moroccan contains chickpeas, meat
and rice. In Nigeria, according to Davidson, "soupy stews or stewlike
soups" are popular. He gives as examples soup, often made with offal,
palm oil, carob, lemon basil, and egusi powder, and various okra
soups. He adds that in Nigeria soup made from goat is "so important
that it is usually served at the most important functions". In 'A
Safari of African Cooking' (1971) Bill Odarty also highlights goat
soup from Liberia. Other Nigerian soups include the spinach-based soup
Efo. A study in 2025 reported that despite their nutritional richness
and cultural importance, traditional soups were declining in
popularity, particularly among younger generations and in urban areas.
Soups from other parts of Africa include Cheruba - a lamb and
vegetable soup with lima beans or chickpeas - from north Africa; a
West African speciality is groundnut soup. Abenkwan, from West Africa,
is a soup of crab meat, pulped palm nuts and lamb. East African
cuisine includes bean soup with tomato, onion, pepper and curry
powder. Supuya papai, from Tanzania, is a cream soup containing
papaya and onion. A Congolese green papaya soup is made with bacon
fat, chicken broth, milk and red pepper. South African soups include
curried snoek head soup. A 2014 study records a Ghanaian saying, "I
haven’t eaten if I don't have my soup and fufu" (a dough of pounded
cocoyam or cassava). The soup is typically based on okra.
The Americas and Australasia
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Soups from the Americas include a spiny lobster soup from Belize,
Cajun crayfish bisque, and gumbo, a hearty soup (or stew)
traditionally made from meat or shellfish with tomatoes, vegetables,
herbs, and spices, thickened with okra. In the Caribbean and Latin
America sancocho is a thick soup typically consisting of meat, tubers,
and other vegetables. soups are found in the West Indies and Brazil.
A Brazilian favourite is , a broth of tomato and coconut with shrimps:
one food writer comments "locals eat steaming bowls on even the
hottest days".
is a Colombian avocado soup), and Mexico has a black bean soup. , a
Peruvian soup, is a chowder of shrimp and chilli pepper and is
reputedly an aphrodisiac. Honduras, the US and Mexico all have a tripe
soup, respectively , pepper pot soup, and . The Mexican is a meatball
soup.
Soups from the US include the clam chowder of New England, which has
entered the international culinary repertoire, an American regional
favourite, Maryland crab soup, and cream of corn soup, which became
popular in California during the 1980s.
Australasian soups include two from New Zealand: toheroa (clam) and
kumara (sweet potato and chilli). Davidson remarks favourably on the
Australian wallabi-tail soup.
Modern times
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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 borscht from the Russian
Empire, clam chowder from the United States, 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 . Many soups are fundamentally the same in the cuisines of various
countries, with minor local variations. Oxtail soup, a familiar item
in British and American cooking, is one of several oxtail soups from
round the world, including one from Sichuan, others from Austria (),
Jamaica, South Africa and France ( - oxtail consommé thickened with
tapioca, garnished with asparagus and diced mushrooms). Chicken soups
have been common to numerous cuisines since ancient times: they
featured in east Asian cooking more than 5,000 years ago, and were
considered therapeutic in pharaonic Egypt, the Roman empire, Persia
and biblical Israel. Modern variants are found from Japan () to
Portugal (), Colombia () and France ().
Elizabeth David comments in 'French Provincial Cooking' (1960), "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
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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
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Many ancient cuisines developed versions of fruit soup: either fruits
were added to a grain-based pottage or the soup consisted mostly of
fruit flavoured with various spices. The soups were made from whatever
fruit was ready for harvest locally or from dried fruit. Fruit soups
remain 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, , a creamy lemon soup
from Finland, and the Middle Eastern , made with dried fruits. Other
fruits used to make sweet soups include apples, blueberries, cherries,
gooseberries, rhubarb and rose-hips.
Sour soups
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Davidson mentions a category, "sour soups", 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 (above), , a meat and vegetable soup found
in many coutries of eastern Europe, north Africa and Asia, and , a
fish soup from Indonesia. Żurek, from Poland, is a sour bread soup
based not on meat or vegetable stock but on fermented cereal such as
rye. According to a Polish cookery book, "it is always sour, salty,
and creamy at the same time".
Portable, tinned and dried soups
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Food preservation has, in Clarkson's phrase, "always been a
preoccupation of the human animal", allowing food to be kept for long
periods. In her 'Domestic Cookery' (1806), Maria Rundell gave a recipe
for "Portable Soup - a very useful thing" - highly concentrated meat
stock that set to a solid consistency: for a bowl of soup it was only
necessary to dissolve some in hot water. By the beginning of the
nineteenth century the Royal Navy had been victualling its ships with
portable soup for some years. Recipes were published 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".
In 1810 Peter Durand, an English inventor, 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.
Canning made soup readily available, easily transportable,
long-lasting and convenient. In 1897 Heinz's rival Campbell's
introduced condensed canned soups, to be diluted with water to produce
double the volume. According to the food historian Reay Tannahill,
tomato soup was not popular in the US or Britain until Campbell's
began marketing it.
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. 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,
"Although many types of processed soup have been criticised for their
salt levels, packet soups are by far the worst". 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.
Literature, screen and stage
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Soups and sops are frequently encountered in
literature. In the King James Bible, Jesus identifies his forthcoming
betrayer: "'He it is, to whom I shall give a sop, when I have dipped
it'. And when he had dipped the sop, he gave it to Judas." 'Stone
Soup', an old folk tale, tells of soup produced by travellers who have
no food and promise to feed the inhabitants of a village who
contribute what they have to a cauldron which at first contains only a
stone but is quickly added to by the villagers, making a tasty soup
for everyone.
The figurative use of "milksop" - literally bread dipped in milk - to
mean a feeble, timid or ineffectual person is found in Chaucer's 'The
Canterbury Tales' and Shakespeare's 'Richard III'. In Jane Austen's
'Pride and Prejudice', Mr Bingley is kept waiting to announce his
forthcoming ball until his cook has made enough white soup, a soup
containing veal stock and almonds, much favoured for dances at the
time. One of Lewis Carroll's best-known characters, the Mock Turtle,
who owes his name to the eponymous soup, sings a song that begins
"Beautiful Soup, so rich and green/ Waiting in a hot tureen!" In Isak
Dinesen's 1958 story "Babette's Feast", turtle soup is the first
course of a magnificent dinner.
Soup is frequently mentioned in films and on television. Though the
foodstuff plays no part in the action, 'Duck Soup' is used as the
title of a 1927 film by Laurel and Hardy and a 1933 film by the Marx
Brothers. In Alfred Hitchcock's 1972 film 'Frenzy', Mrs Oxford serves
her nonplussed husband a soup containing "smelts, ling, conger eel,
John Dory, pilchards and frogfish". In the 1990s a character dubbed
"the Soup Nazi" appeared in 'Seinfeld', an American television comedy
series: his magnificent soup-making was offset by his bullying manner.
'Tortilla Soup' is a 2001 film comedy about a retired restaurateur and
his family's love of food.
In the theatre, 'Chicken Soup with Barley' is the title of a 1956
stage play by Arnold Wesker. A later stage play was the comedy
'There's a Girl in My Soup', in which, again, the actual soup is
purely nominal; it ran in the West End for 2,547 performances between
1966 and 1969.
Gallery
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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
See also
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* Lists of foods
* List of bean soups
* List of fish and seafood soups
* Soup and sandwich
* Soup spoon
* Three grand soups
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=========
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Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup
