It’s officially soup season here at our house. Although we enjoy soup year-round, it is when the chill is in the air that we truly embrace a variety of these belly-warming concoctions.
According to The History of Food by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, soup is derived “from ‘sop’ or ‘sup’ meaning the slice of bread on which broth is poured.” And, until bread was invented, “a thick soup was a concoction of grains, or of plants or meat cooking in a pot.” Further, “gruel or porridge was thus a basic food, a staple form of nourishment.”
Here in our house, it is a bit of both. But, whether it is the bread-and-broth variety, or the gruel/porridge variety, soup provides us with nourishment for the body and for the soul (Yes, I’m conjuring up the chicken soup analogy here) during these chilly months.
My childhood soup memories are varied. I was served Campbell’s chicken noodle soup for lunch, alongside buttered saltine crackers. My Dad boasted that the only thing he could make was Campbell’s Bean with Bacon soup (which, I found rather tasty).
But on the other end of soup spectrum is perhaps one of my favorite soup memories of days gone by: Grandma’s chicken soup. It sat on the stove, warm and ready to eat, when we arrived for Sunday afternoons with the family. Her greasy-topped broth was filled with bits of chicken, vegetables, and small little homemade dumplings. Oh, I could almost smell it – and taste it – now.
