Soup recipes: to warm the body and nourish the soul

A pot of soup can transform humble ingredients into something extraordinary. And so easy to make.

MAIN INGREDIENT

Chicken
Tomato
Vegetable
Squash
Lentil
Onion
Broccoli
Leek & Potato
Carrot

ALL SOUPS

What is Soup?

Liquid food. Meat or vegetables in stock or water, heated up. Sometimes cold. Ranges from watery broth to something thick enough you need a fork.

Ancient Stuff

Soup has been around for maybe 50,000 years. And before pots got invented, people maybe boiled water in animal skins. Started with grains and herbs. Eventually someone threw in beans, then meat, then whatever was lying around.

Fun detail: “soup” used to mean soggy bread in broth. The bread mattered more than the liquid. Then people flipped it—liquid became the main event, bread was just for dipping.

Everyone Makes It

Vietnam has pho. Japan’s got miso and ramen. France does onion soup. Italy makes minestrone. Russians make borscht. Scotland has delicious cullen skink thats made with smoked haddock. West Africa makes groundnut soup. In America New England is famous for clam chowder. Louisiana does gumbo.

Chicken soup shows up in basically every culture going back thousands of years. Someone started calling it “Jewish penicillin” because your grandmother swears it’ll fix whatever’s wrong with you.

Types

French cooking divides soup into clear (consommé) or thick (creams and purées). Then you’ve got cold soups—gazpacho from Spain, vichyssoise which is basically fancy cold potato soup. Germany and Scandinavia do sweet fruit soups. Eastern Europe makes sour soups with fermented stuff or vinegar.

Poor People’s Food

In the past, soup kept poor people from starving. Its cheap, filling and easy to stretch when you’re feeding eight people with one chicken. Soup kitchens started in the Middle East in the 1500s and spread everywhere after that.

Irish famine hits in the 1840s, this chef Alexis Soyer sets up a massive kitchen in Dublin. Fed a thousand people an hour. Great Depression in America, even Al Capone’s running a soup kitchen in Chicago. Salvation Army doing the same thing across multiple countries.

Then Companies Got Involved

1810—someone invents canned soup. Late 1800s, Heinz and Campbell’s start selling it everywhere. Campbell’s figures out you can condense it, sell it for cheap, people add water at home. Boom—instant convenience.

Packet soups came later, mid-1900s. Convenient but loaded with salt. Still are, mostly.

Soup has been been there ever since humans have been cooking. Feeding everyone. Still doing it.