INTRODUCTION

Writing as her proper Victorian persona, Miss Manners, author Judith Martin wrote, “Do you have a kinder, more adaptable friend in the food world than soup? Who soothes you when you are ill? Who refuses to leave you when you are impoverished and stretches its resources to give you hearty sustenance and cheer? Who warms you in winter and cools you in summer? Yet who is also capable of doing honor to your richest table and impressing your most demanding guests? . . . Soup does its loyal best, no matter what undignified conditions are imposed upon it. You don’t catch steak hanging around when you’re poor or sick, do you?”

And it’s true. Soup is a category of food that transcends classes, cuisines, and eating occasions. While certain soups may be more appealing than others, there’s no one who can say, “I don’t like soup.” That’s probably why it’s been around for many thousands of years.

Soup is as old as the history of cooking, and there is evidence of soup dating from 20,000 BCE. While turning a hunk of animal over a fire on a spit is likely older, combining various ingredients in a large vat to create a dish that’s filling, nutritious, and easily digested was probably right behind it. Before the development of waterproof clay containers, boiling took place in animal hides or watertight baskets of reeds, with hot rocks added to make the water boil. Like other categories of food, soups evolved over the centuries according to what ingredients were local.

Physicians in many cultures have prescribed soups to counteract illness since ancient times. Soups simmered with medicinal herbs have been part of Chinese medicine for centuries, and are based on the concept of yin and yang. Yin foods are cooling and yang foods are heating, and all foods are categorized by their yin and yang properties. Foods like oranges, pork, and dried figs all are yin foods that reduce fevers and inflammation, while ginseng, quail, and azuki beans are yang foods that promote circulation and vitality.

Our modern English word “soup” comes from the French word sope and the Middle Ages English word soupe. Back then, however, what they really meant was not a soup as we know it today but a “sop,” which was a thick piece of bread that became soaked in a liquid as it was used as a combination plate and spoon. The most common eating implement at the time was the knife, which was much more like a dagger than the place knife of today. Forks and spoons did not become commonplace for another few centuries.

Soups were important in the medieval diet, as was the bread by which they were sopped up, and they usually were served at the end of

the day as the lesser of the day’s two meals. From this custom of including a sop as part of the end of the day meal is where we get our word supper. The same root word accounts for the Italian zuppa (soup), which comes from the Greek suppa (or “slice of bread, soaking”).

Street vendors in sixteenth-century Paris sold concentrated soups as a pick-me-up for physical exhaustion and they were referred to as restaurants, meaning something that was restoring. In 1765 a shop specializing in such soups opened, and thus the word restaurant entered our vocabulary. And soups have played a role on restaurant menus ever since.

Soups started to gain their position as sophisticated foods in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. In 1790, Francesco Leonardi, who was chef to King Louis XV of France and later to the Russian Queen, Catherine II, published L’Apicio moderno, a six-volume cookbook. The first volume was Zuppa e Minestre, which he described as “dishes fit for princes.”

In Auguste Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire, first published in 1903, he credits the development of classic French soups to famed French chef Marie-Antonin Carême, who was chef to Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I before serving as chef to the Rothschild family in Paris. Escoffier wrote that “the culinary preparations of current-day France date only from the early part of the nineteenth century, and on this point as on many others, the culinary arts owes much to Carême.”

Escoffier did not take soups for granted, however. In the same book he wrote that “of all the items on the menu, soup is that which exacts the most delicate perfection and the strictest attention.”

While fancy consommé and delicate creamed soups were becoming the fare of the elegant table, the soups that were being cooked in America came along with the settlers and waves of immigration beginning with the English, French, and Spanish in the seventeenth century.

The first colonial cookbook was published by William Parks in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1742; it was based on Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife; or Accomplished Gentlewoman’s Companion, a London best seller published in 1727. Parks did make some attempts to Americanize it, deleting certain recipes “the ingredients or material for which are not to be had in this country,” but for the most part it remained loyal to Mrs. Smith. Included were both soup and bisque recipes. The first truly American cookbook, and one that contained a chapter on soups, is Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery, published in 1796. It was the first book to use corn, pumpkin and other squash, cranberries, and other foodstuffs native to this continent.

Another landmark book for American soup cookery is Lydia Maria Child’s The American Frugal Housewife: Dedicated to Those Who Are Not Ashamed of Economy, published in 1828. This first culinary Mrs. Child was an abolitionist, women’s rights activist, novelist, and poet who is perhaps best remembered for her Thanksgiving poem “Over the River and Through the Wood.” Part of frugality is stretching meals by making soups, and she has many recipes included, along with listings on such topics as “the cheapest cuts of meat,” all of which are appropriate for soup making.

As successive waves of immigrants from around the world arrived on American soil, they brought their soups with them. In fact, the melting pot metaphor was in use as early as the 1780s. The German immigrants in Pennsylvania were known for their potato soups, while their brethren arriving later and settling down the Ohio River in Cincinnati had a special sauerkraut soup. While Italian Wedding Soup is really Italian-American, the abundance of Italian restaurants in this country today has added immeasurably to the repertoire of authentic soups served.

But American menus in the twenty-first century include a cornucopia of innovative soups as well as authentic ones, and many of the country’s wonderful chefs have shared their soup recipes with me. In some cases you’ll find related recipes juxtaposed that demonstrate the approach taken to the same ingredients by two different chefs.

Many of these recipes are for small soups— both hot and cold—to serve in the timehonored place of the first food of a meal. “From soup to nuts” means from the beginning to the end, and soup is doing its part to remain loyal to the definition.

But then there are some heartier soups that could really be the meal itself, including ones made with all sorts of animal protein and others made with beans and legumes. These are the soups referenced by Judith Martin as Miss Manners, and they come from around the world.