Soup
Soup is a primarily liquid food, generally served warm or hotthough it is sometimes served chilledmade 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 banquets as well as in 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 regionschicken soups and oxtail soups are known round the world. Others remain almost entirely exclusive to their region of origin.
Name
The term soup, or words like it, can be found in many languages. Similar terms include the Italian zuppa, the German Suppe, the Danish suppe, the Russian суп, the Spanish sopa and the Polish zupa. 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 suppare"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 soupe, 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 Schwarzbrotsuppe, the Russian Okroshka and the Italian pappa al pomodoro. The Dictionnaire de l'Académie française records the term "soupe" 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 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."
History
Prehistory
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. 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
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. De re coquinaria, 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 Das Buoch von guoter Spise 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 Du fait de cuisine 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. Clarkson comments that about a fifth of May's recipes are for soups of one kind or another.
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 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: service à la russeRussian-style service: dishes were served one at a time, usually beginning with soup.
Soup for the poor
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 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.
Regional cuisines
Asia
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 and dried fermented tuna, with miso 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 Rasam , a thin, spicy soup, typically made with lentils, tomatoes, and seasonings including tamarind, pepper, and chillies. In Thai cuisine gaeng chud are soups: the most popular are tom yum kung made with prawns and tom khaa gai made from galangal, chicken and coconut milk. Pho is a Vietnamese soup, usually made from beef stock and spices with noodles and thinly sliced beef or chicken added. In Filipino cookery sinigang 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 Kaldereta, a goat soup. The soups of Indonesia include Soto , sop udang and sop kepiting. Garudhiya is a soup served in the Maldives, with chunks of tuna in it.
Two soups from Armenia are a cucumber and yoghurt soup called jajik, and bozbash, containing lamb and fruit; dyushbara is a dumpling soup from Azerbaijan; Tibetan cooking includes tsamsuk, made from grains, butter, soya and cheese. An Iranian summer soup, mast-o khiar, is made with yoghurt, cucumber, and mint. Turkish Khash is made from the meat from animal heads and feet. Tarhana, 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 Yayla çorbasi, a yoghurt soup with rice or barley. Like chicken soup it has curative properties ascribed to it by some.