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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 . 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 and legume soups are known round the world; others remain almost entirely exclusive to their region of origin.
According to the lexicographer John Ayto, "the etymology 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".Ayto, p. 344 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 (black bread soup), the Russian Okroshka and the Italian pappa al pomodoro (tomato pulp).Clarkson, pp. 90–91 The Dictionnaire de l'Académie française records the term "soupe" in French use from the twelfth century but adds that it is probably earlier. "soupe", Dictionnaire de l'Académie française. Retrieved 14 June 2025 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.Clarkson, pp. 26–27
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 (Gulyás).Bickel, p. 426; and Grigson, p. 308 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."McGee, p. 581
During the seventeenth century the soup itself, rather than the "sops" it contained, became seen as the most important element of the dish.Tannahill, p. 237 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.Clarkson, p. 29
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.Clarkson, p. 30 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 russe – Russian-style service: dishes were served one at a time, usually beginning with soup.
Charitable soup kitchen 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.Abu-Manneh, Butrus. "Singer: Constructing Ottoman Beneficence: An Imperial Soup Kitchen in Jerusalem", Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2, 2005, p. 123 From the late eighteenth century, soup-kitchens (in German Suppenküche, in French, soupes populaires) were set up in Germany, France, England and elsewhere.Clarkson, pp. 55–56 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.Cowen, pp. 120–121 During the Irish famine, which began in 1845, he set up a kitchen in Dublin capable of feeding a thousand people an hour.Ray, Elizabeth. "Soyer, Alexis Benoît (1810–1858)" , Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2011.
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.Clarkson, p, 57 In the same period the Salvation Army ran similar operations elsewhere in the US and in Canada, Australia and Britain.Schetterer, June. "Salvation Army – 80 Years of Service in New Rochelle", The Standard-Star, 8 May 1969, p. 4; and "Soup Kitchen is Opened for Needy in City", Shawnee News-Star, 20 December 1931, p. 15; "Salvation Army Feeding Many Hungry Hoboes", The Cornwall Freeholder, 31 January 1931, p. 1; "The Tragedy of Unemployment", The Williamstown Advertiser, 15 June 1929, p. 4; and "Soup Kitchen Opens", Cheltenham Chronicle, 10 Nov 1934, p. 5
In China, soups wholly unknown in the west were developed, including bird's nest and shark's fin soups.Clarkson, pp. 106–107 Snake soup continues to be an iconic tradition in Cantonese culture, and that of Hong Kong.Landry Yuan, Félix et al. "Conservation and Cultural Intersections within Hong Kong’s Snake Soup Industry", Oryx, Vol. 57, No. 1, 2023, p. 40 In China, rat soup is considered the equal of oxtail soup.Davidson and Jaine, p. 673
Indian cuisine includes rasam (sometimes called pepper-water), 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.Davidson and Jaine, p. 817 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.Davidson, p. 342 The soups of Indonesia include soto ayam (chicken), sop udang (shrimp with rice vermicelli) and sop kepiting (crab).Anderson (1995), pp. 18–20 and 24 Garudhiya is a soup served in the Maldives, with chunks of tuna in it.Davidson and Jaine, p. 487
Two soups from Armenia are a cucumber and yoghurt soup called jajik, and bozbash, containing lamb and fruit;Davidson, p. 35 dyushbara is a dumpling soup from Azerbaijan;Davidson and Jaine, p. 48 Tibetan cooking includes tsamsuk, made from grains, butter, soya and cheese.Davidson, p. 808 An Iranian summer soup, mast-o khiar, is made with yoghurt, cucumber, and mint.Davidson and Jaine, p. 415 Turkish kelle-paça is made from the meat from animal heads and feet.Davidson and Jaine, p. 302 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.Tarakçı, Zekai, Ismail S. Dogan, and A. Faik Koca. "A Traditional Fermented Turkish Soup", International Journal of Food Science & Technology, Vol. 39, No 4, April 2004, p. 455 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.
The many cuisines of Europe have a wide range of soups. Among the soups of Italy are minestrone, zuppa pavese and straciatella, respectively a vegetable broth, consommé with poached eggs, and a meat broth with eggs and cheese.David (1987), pp. 53 and 58–61 From Belgium there are potage liégeois – a pea and bean soup – and soupe tchantches, a vegetable soup with fine vermicelli and milk.Davidson, p. 71 Bulgarian cuisine includes tarator, a cold yoghurt and cucumber soup.Davidson, p. 783 Dutch soups include erwtensoep – a split pea soup – and bruinebonensoep, a brown bean soup eaten with rye bread and bacon.Davidson and Jaine, p. 550 A soup from the Faeroe Islands is raskjøt, made with dried mutton.Davidson, p. 286 Erbensuppe mit Schweinsohren, is a German split pea soup with pig's ear.Davidson, p. 265 Zivju supa, a Latvian fish soup incorporates whole pieces of cooked fish with potato;Davidson and Jaine, p. 459 The Finnish kesäkeitto is a light summer soup of seasonal vegetables cooked in milk and water;Bonekamp, p. 27 the Swedish köttsoppa is a meat and vegetable soup;Bonekamp, p. 25 the Norwegian blomkålspuré is cauliflower soup with egg yolks and cream. Gehäck, from Luxembourg, is made with pork offal, and finished with prunes soaked in local white wine.Davidson and Jaine, p. 480
Maltese soups include soppa tal-armla ("widow's soup"), made with green and white vegetables and garnished with a poached egg and cheese, and aljotta a light fish soup flavoured with garlic and marjoram.Davidson and Jaine, p. 489 Two soups from Poland are chlodnik, a crayfish and beetroot soup, served chilledDavidson, p. 175 and grochowka, yellow-pea soup with barley.Davidson, p. 615 Portuguese soups include canja (chicken) and caldo verde (potato and cabbage).Davidson and Jaine, p. 644 Cullen skink (smoked haddock soup)Davidson and Jaine, p. 237 and nettle soupDavidson, p. 531 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 juha, a meat and vegetable soup.Davidson and Jaine, pp. 745–746 Russian soups include schi (cabbage soup), solyanka (vegetable soup with meat or fish), rassolnik (pickled cucumber soup), and ukha (fish soup).; ; ;
Soups from other parts of Africa include Cheruba – a lamb and vegetable soup with lima beans or chickpeas – from north Africa;Hachten, p. 12 a West African speciality is Peanut soup.Hachten, p. 212 Abenkwan, from West Africa, is a soup of crab meat, pulped palm nuts and lamb.Hafner, p. 34Odarty, p. 46 East African cuisine includes bean soup with tomato, onion, pepper and curry powder.Hachten, p. 237 Supuya papai, from Tanzania, is a cream soup containing papaya and onion.Hafner, p. 110 A Congolese green papaya soup is made with bacon fat, chicken broth, milk and red pepper.Odarty, p. 33 South African soups include curried Barracuda head soup.Van Wyck, p. 14 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).Williams-Forson, pp. 69, 75 and 83 The soup is typically based on okra.Williams-Forson, p. 75
A Brazilian favourite is Moqueca de camarão, a broth of tomato and coconut with shrimps: one food writer comments "locals eat steaming bowls on even the hottest days".Smith, Jen Rose. " "20 of the world’s best soups", The Albany Herald, 17 November 2024
Ajiaco Santaferenio is a Colombian avocado soup),Davidson and Jaine, p. 208 and Mexico has a black bean soup.Davidson, p. 371 Chupe de camarones, 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 mondongo, pepper pot soup, and menudo.Davidson, pp. 151 and 596 The Mexican sopa de alb digas is a meatball soup.Smith, p. 551
Soups from the US include the clam chowder of New England, which has entered the international culinary repertoire,Saulnier, p. 51 an American regional favourite, Maryland crab soup,Oliver, p. 172 and cream of sweetcorn soup, which became popular in California during the 1980s.Lovegren, p. 298
Australasian soups include two from New Zealand: toheroa (clam) and sweet potato (sweet potato and chilli).Davidson and Jaine, p. 552; and Baker, p. 47 Davidson remarks favourably on the Australian wallaby-tail soup.Davidson, p. 40
The French distinction between clear and thick soups is echoed in other languages: in German Klare Suppen and Gebundene Suppen; in Italian Brodi and Zuppe; and in Spanish Sopas claras and Sopas spessas.Bickel, p. 59 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 (Ochsenschleppsuppe), Jamaica, South Africa and France (potage bergére – oxtail consommé thickened with tapioca, garnished with asparagus and diced mushrooms).Davidson, p. 562; Hess and Hess, p. 14; Scala Quinn, p. 61; Van Wyk, p. 18; and Saulnier, p. 33 Chicken soups have been common to numerous cuisines since ancient times: they featured in east Asian cooking more than 5,000 years ago,Chuah, Benjamin The History of Chicken Soup", The Oxford Student, 28 April 2019 and were considered therapeutic in ancient Egypt, the Roman empire, Samanid Empire and biblical Israel.Klawans, p. 176; and Rumble, p. 67 Modern variants are found from Japan (tori no suimono)Davidson and Jaine, p. 428 to Portugal (canja), Davidson and Jaine, p. 644 Colombia ( ajiaco) Davidson and Jaine, p. 644 and France (consommé de volaille).Saulnier, p. 2
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".David (2008), p. 136 In their Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961), Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle and Julia Child write:
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.Clarkson, p. 81 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.Clarkson, p. 83 Canning made soup readily available, easily transportable, long-lasting and convenient.Featherstone, pp. xxvii–xxviii 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.Tannahill, p. 207
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.Clarkson, p. 76 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".Edwardes, p. 234 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.Willems, Astrid A. et al. "Effects of Salt Labelling and Repeated In-Home Consumption on Long-Term Liking of Reduced-Salt Soups", Public Health Nutrition 17.5 (2014), p. 1130
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."The Monk's Tale" – Prologue, line 22; and Richard III, Act V, scene 3 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.Anderson (2022), p. 77 One of Lewis Carroll's best-known characters, the Mock Turtle, who owes his name to the eponymous soup,Gardner and Burstein, p. xv sings a song that begins "Beautiful Soup, so rich and green/ Waiting in a hot tureen!"Gardner and Burstein, p. 125 In Karen Blixen's 1958 story "Babette's Feast", turtle soup is the first course of a magnificent dinner.Dinesen, pp. 55–56
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 HardyEverson, p. 41 and a 1933 film by the Marx Brothers.Eyles, pp. 44–45 In Alfred Hitchcock's 1972 film Frenzy, Mrs Oxford serves her nonplussed husband a soup containing "smelts, Common ling, conger eel, John Dory, and frogfish".Zimmerman, p. 100 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.Hogan, Michael. "The 10 best fictional chefs" , The Guardian, 16 October 2015. Tortilla Soup is a 2001 film comedy about a retired restaurateur and his family'
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.Herbert, p. 1319
History
Prehistory
Before the invention of boiling in water, cooking was limited to simple heating and roasting.Speth, John. Did Humans Learn to Boil?", Paleoanthropology, 5 September 2014, pp. 54–55 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 , boiling animal bones and drinking the broth.Van Dyk, Garritt. "Good soup is one of the prime ingredients of good living: a (condensed) history of soup, from cave to can", The Conversation, 4 June 2023 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".Fisher, p. 34 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.Rumble, p. 3 In her 2010 work Soup: A Global History, Janet Clarkson writes that the ancient Romans had a great variety of soups. De re coquinaria (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.Clarkson, p. 26
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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 Buch von guter Spise (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 Du fait de cuisine (From the Kitchen) has many recipes for potages and "sops" including several regional variants.Clarkson, p. 27
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.Tannahill, p. 251
Regional cuisines
Asia
In Asian countries soup became a familiar breakfast dish, but has not, according to Clarkson, done so in the west.Clarkson, pp. 107–108 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".Clarkson, p. 106 Ramen, a noodle soup, popular in Japan and latterly internationally, is documented only from the second half of the nineteenth century.Tsu, Timothy Y. "Review of Slurp! A Social and Culinary History of Ramen – Japan’s Favorite Noodle Soup, by Barak Kushner", The Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1, 2014, pp. 224–226
Europe
From the sixteenth century onwards, Paris was known for its street vendors selling soup, and in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, Les Halles, 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 gratin]]. " Dégustation : la soupe à l'oignon, bonne à en pleurer!" , Le Parisien, 21 January 2015. Retrieved 27 August 2023Briffault, p. 155 This gratinée des Halles transcended class distinctions, becoming the breakfast of the forts des Halles – the workers responsible for transporting the goods – and a restorative for the party people leaving the cabarets of Paris late at night.Blum-Reid, p. 187
Africa
Arab shorba typically contains meat and oats;Davidson, p. 32 Egyptian food includes Mulukhiyah]], a soup of jute leaves and meat.Davidson, p. 257 The Moroccan harira contains chickpeas, meat and rice.Davidson, p. 515 In Nigeria, according to Davidson, "soupy stews or stewlike soups" are popular. He gives as examples egusi 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".Davidson, p. 842 In A Safari of African Cooking (1971) Bill Odarty also highlights goat soup from Liberia.Odarty, p. 72 Other Nigerian soups include the spinach-based soup Efo.Odarty, p. 90 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.Oluwadunsin, Olugbuyi, Ajibola Mitchell Oyinloye, Toyin Olanike Adaramoye, Adefisola Bola Adepeju and Kemisola Joy Ojo (2025). "Introduction" "Analysis of nutritional properties, sensory attributes and perceived consumption frequency of some selected Nigeria indigenous soup", Discover Food, Vol. 5, June 2025
The Americas and Australasia
Soups from the Americas include a spiny lobster soup from Belize,Davidson, p. 151 Cajun crayfish bisque,Davidson and Jaine, p. 128 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, , and other vegetables. Callalloo soups are found in the West Indies and Brazil.Davidson, p. 125
Modern times
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:
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 or gratin soups. But in important dinners – by this I mean rich dinners – only the first two classes are recognised".Escoffier, p. 197
Louis Saulnier's Le Répertoire de la cuisine, first published in 1914, contains six pages of details of potages (clear soups), two pages on soupes (moistened with water, milk or thin white stock), eight pages on veloutés (soups thickened with egg yolks) and crèmes (thickened with double cream),Saulnier, pp. 33–50 as well as a further three pages on fifty-three "Potages étrangers" – 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.Saulnier, pp. 50–53
Cold soups
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
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 rødgrød, also known as rote Grütze, a red berry soup popular in Denmark, other parts of Scandinavia and Germany, sitruunakeitto, a creamy lemon soup from Finland, and the Middle Eastern khoshab, made with dried fruits. Other fruits used to make sweet soups include apples, blueberries, cherries, gooseberries, rhubarb and rose-hips.Davidson and Jaine, p. 332
Sour soups
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 sinisang (above), chorba, a meat and vegetable soup found in many coutries of eastern Europe, north Africa and Asia,Davidson, p. 736 and sop ikan pedas, a fish soup from Indonesia.Anderson (1995), p. 23 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".Applebaum and Crittenden, p. 78
Portable, tinned and dried soups
Food preservation has, in Clarkson's phrase, "always been a preoccupation of the human animal",Clarkson, p. 67 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"Rundell, pp. 101–102 – 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.Tannahill, p. 229 By the beginning of the nineteenth century the Royal Navy had been victualling its ships with portable soup for some years.Clarkson, p. 70 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".Clarkson, p. 68
Literature, screen and stage
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 Iscariot." 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.Irving, p. 95
"Tortilla Soup"], Gastronomica, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2002, p. 100
Gallery
Notes, references and sources
Notes
Sources
(2025). 9780393245431, W. W. Norton. ISBN 9780393245431
(1977). 9780273001638, Pitman Publishing and Gale Research. ISBN 9780273001638
See also
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