the most general of the terms which apply to liquid savoury dishes, embraces broth, consommé, bisque, potage, etc. According to Ayto (1993), the word is derived from the same prehistoric German root which produced English sup and supper. From that root came a noun, suppa, which passed into Old French as soupe. This meant both ‘piece of bread soaked in liquid’ and, by extension, ‘broth poured onto bread’. The word, with the latter meaning, entered English in the 17th century, joining the term ‘sop’, which had already arrived separately and was well established as meaning the bit of bread that was soaked. (Ayto also points out that the arrival of the word ‘soup’ fell in the period when people began to serve the liquid soup without the hitherto always present sops.)
Similar terms in other languages include the Italian zuppa, the German Suppe, Danish suppe, etc.
Of the various categories of dish which may be eaten, soup can certainly be counted among the most basic. Its role (in that small fraction of the world's population which eats western-style meals of several courses and is familiar with restaurant meals and ‘dinner parties’) as an appetizing first course should be viewed against the historical background, in which soups with solids in them were a meal in themselves for poorer people, especially in rural areas. Such soups can stray, over what is necessarily an imprecisely demarcated frontier, into the realm of stews. This tendency is noticeable among fish soups, for example; many of the best-known dishes which are referred to as fish soups, for example bouillabaisse, display it.
The domain of soups is so vast that it includes several large categories. One is that of the fruit soups which are popular in N. Europe and the northern parts of C. Europe. Another is the host of ‘sour soups’ which are important in N., E., and C. Europe. Lesley Chamberlain (1989) has interesting things to say about these, not only those with a fermented ‘beer’ base or using sauerkraut but many with a subtler sour element, imparted by a dash of vinegar to finish, or pickled beet juice (see borshch). She counts the Balkan sour soups, notably the many sorts of ciorba (see shorba), which are likely to use lemon or yoghurt as souring agents, as a subgenre, ‘part of a different gastronomic world, more centred on Istanbul than on Vienna’.
One might postulate another category, that of which it could be said, giving only a slightly different focus to the nursery rhyme about the little girl who had a curl right in the middle of her forehead, that ‘when they are good they are very very good, but when they are bad they're simply horrid’. Tomato soup is a prime example, often concealing its identity when of the inferior kind under the name ‘soop doojoor’, which is a near-ubiquitous legacy to the restaurants of the world of French gastronomy. Pea soup is another. Brown Windsor, now almost extinct, was another, of which Ayto writes:
Brown Windsor was the music-hall joke amongst British soups, an undistinguished meat broth—often the thinly disguised offspring of a stock cube—trotted out in seaside boarding-houses, train restaurant-cars and the like. The origins of the name are, perhaps deservedly, lost in obscurity—Mrs Beeton, for instance, does not mention it—but it may have some connections with a sort of transparent brown soap popularly known in the nineteenth century as brown Windsor.
A joke it became, but Garrett, editing his twelve-volume encyclopedia of cookery in the 1890s, took it very seriously, bidding the cook begin by boiling three calf's feet for an hour and finish—after adding Madeira wine along the way— by putting a dozen crayfish quenelles into what was evidently, for him, a luxury soup. This same author had a keen eye for the unusual (witness his Sanitary soup and Vocalist's soup), and gave over 120 soup recipes altogether. The longest entry was that for mulligatawny soup (see Anglo-Indian cookery).
A list of exotic or strange soups would have to include the ‘teakettle soup’ of Wales (see brewis), and its C. Asian counterpart, the ‘teapot soup’ of Afghanistan (see Helen Saberi, 1992), and two renowned specialities of China, bird's nest soup and shark's fin soup.
Finally, the role of certain soups as invalid food has to be acknowledged, together with the importance attached in the 19th and much of the 20th century in England to ‘soup kitchens’ as a means of giving food to the needy or homeless (in which connection see the discussion under Rumford).
See also borshch; chłodnik; cock-a-leekie; consommé; cullen skink; Scotch broth; minestrone; mock turtle soup (also turtle and sea turtle); portable soup; potage; shchi; vichyssoise.
Alan Davidson was a distinguished author and publisher, and one of the world's best-known writers on fish and fish cookery. In 1975 he retired early from the diplomatic service—after serving in, among other places, Washington, Egypt, Tunisia, and Laos, where he was British Ambassador—to pursue a fruitful second career as a food historian and food writer extraordinaire. Among his popular books are Seafood of South-East Asia, North Atlantic Seafood, and Mediterranean Seafood. In 2003, shortly before his death, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize for his contribution to European culture.
Ayto, John (1993), The Diner's Dictionary, Oxford: OUP.
Chamberlain, Lesley (1989), The Food and Cooking of Eastern Europe, London: Penguin.
Saberi, Helen (1992), ‘Public Eating in Afghanistan’, in Walker (1992).
