Janet Clarkson - Soup: A Global History

Edible

Series Editor: Andrew F. Smith

EDIBLE is a revolutionary new series of books dedicated to food and drink that explores the rich history of cuisine. Each book reveals the global history and culture of one type of food or beverage.

Already published

Janet Clarkson

REAKTION BOOKS

This book is dedicated to my grandchildren.

May we share the making and eating of many bowls of soup.

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London EC1V 0DX, UK
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2010

Copyright Janet Clarkson 2010

All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and
Index match the printed edition of this book.

Printed and bound in China

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Clarkson, Janet, 1947
Soup: a global history. (Edible)
1. Soups. 2. Soups History.
I. Title II. Series
641.813-DC22

eISBN: 9781861898906

It is impossible to think of any good meal, no matter how plain or elegant, without soup or bread in it.

M.F.K. Fisher

A mild panic set in about two minutes after I committed to writing a book on the global history of soup which I did on no stronger impulse than that I really, really, like soup. A great personal affection for soup might be a strong enough hook for a celebrity chef to hang a cookbook upon, but celebrity chef I am not and anyway, this is not meant to be a cookbook (although, be reassured, it does contain some recipes). So, what was I going to hang my book on?

There must be at least a distant, tenuous claim to fame for any topic to justify a dedicated book, surely? Herein, I discovered in a moment of clarity, lay my problem. Soup is not inherently sexy (like chocolate, for example), ridiculously extravagant (truffles), mysteriously exotic (flamingo tongues) or even cute (cupcakes), amusing (fortune cookies) or sporty (hot dogs.) Eating soup does not promise passion (oysters), provide a frisson of danger (fugu) or provoke disgust (cockroaches), neither does it present an ethical dilemma (foie gras) or a legal one (ortolans).

Cauldrons suspended over an outdoor fire, from Bartolomeo Scappis Opera (1570).

The truth is, the idea of soup is not even vaguely un-familiar to anyone, anywhere, on this entire planet. The problem with soup as a topic is that by virtue of its being universal and ubiquitous, it seems almost by definition to be uninspiring.

Huge cauldron in a 16th-century Italian kitchen, from Scappis Opera.

Here came my second moment of clarity. This universality is soups claim to fame.

There are many cultures that do not eat bread or great meaty roasts, or are too far from the water to have access tofish, or from fast-food outlets for chicken nuggets but every society since very early times has had a liquid staple of some sort. This is the glory of soup. It is the only truly universal dish one with an infinite number of variations, to be sure, but essentially always just some stuff cooked in water, with the flavoured water becoming a crucial part of the dish.

The unequalled adaptability of soup is its secondary claim to fame. What other dish can include absolutely every pos sible edible (and sometimes not so edible) thing in the globe from pickle juice to pearls, and can be made to adapt to every occasion, every economic or political circumstance, all religious laws and all personal tastes?

What we now call soup has had a variety of names over its history. Broth is recorded from about the year 1000, although more commonly in the medieval era the name of a dish gave no clue to its soupy consistency, but it can be surmised from the recipe. By the fifteenth century, however, such dishes were regularly identified as potages, so that one manuscript lists Potages dyvers [diverse]. Potage comes from the French for that which is put in the pot, and the name was applied to a huge variety of dishes so cooked, so that you could have a potage of eggs, for example.

Until well into the seventeenth century in England potages were often highly complex made dishes such as an entire chicken surrounded by various other delicacies and garnishes, sitting in a pool of its cooking liquid. The liquid itself was by this time the crucial component, as the definition of potage from the 1606 Tresor de la langue franaise indicates: It is water boiled with flesh, herbs, or other meat in a cooking pot.

In its earliest days however, a potage was the one-pot basic meal of every household. It was a thick (if you were lucky) mess of a staple grain or pulse, with the addition (if you were very lucky) of some available greens or other vegetables. If the name and the style of the dish sound suspiciously like porridge it is because they are essentially the same thing. In fact, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word porridge is simply a variant of pottage. The OED does, however, admit the possible influence of something called porray in the word-mix. Porray was a type of medieval soup/porridge/pottage usually made of leeks or peas, with either the leeks (poireau in French) or the peas (pois) giving the name. Porray (the word) has added its own etymological confusion to the vocabulary of soup, as it sounds suspiciously similar to pure. The OED admits the words are virtually indistinguishable in Old French, where pure does in fact seem to apply particularly to pea soup.

At the same time as there was potage, there were sops (soupes in French), or pieces of bread used to sop up the liquid part of the dish. The words come from the Latin verb suppare, meaning to soak. In the 1606 French dictionary quoted above,