It’s getting to be that time of year when you need to build in a few minutes every morning to heat your car up, and while that means that many of us are going without our much-needed beauty sleep, it also means that it is, at long last, soup season.
Soup, the common term for foodstuffs made primarily of liquid, is found in nearly every cuisine on every continent on Earth. It’s simple to make, easily digestible, and filling. It’s no surprise, then, that the history of soup around the world is extremely extensive.
The earliest known example of a soup bowl, according to an article from Campbell’s, was found in Xianrendong Cave in Jiangxi Province, China, and appears to date back to 20,000 BCE. The scorch marks on this bowl suggest that it was used to make hot soup, which probably would have incorporated grains, legumes, and meat as ingredients.
Jiangxi Province is famous today for its Nanchang Jar soup, which can be made from pork, chicken, ginseng, or Chinese wolfberry, and is traditionally carried around in a jar. According to local legend, Nanchang Jar soup was invented by a court official named Tangbin during the Ming Dynasty, which ruled from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. While this means that early humans probably weren’t eating Nanchang Jar soup, it does show that throughout history, soup has emerged over and over as popular and versatile dishes.
However, as the article points out, before this point, ancient humans may have simply dug a hole in the ground and dropped hot stones on the ingredients to cook soup. Neanderthals were known to do this in Europe around the same time that the Xianrendong bowl was created.
Several millennia later, the Ancient Romans became one of the best-documented soup-loving cultures. In the first century CE, Marcus Apicius wrote De re coquirinia (literally “On the Subject of Cooking”), a cookbook which described, among other recipes, Polus, a soup made of hulled wheat, chickpeas, broad beans, onions, garlic, and greens. The Ancient Romans were also responsible for introducing gazpacho to Spain and diffusing various ingredients and culinary traditions across their extensive empire in Europe and Africa.
Besides the first soup bowl in China, another invention much later changed the way we eat soup again. During the Renaissance, the popularity of tall, stiff collars made it difficult for Europeans to eat soup by drinking from the bowl like they always had. This led to the invention of the soup spoon, which made eating soup an altogether much cleaner affair.
In the 20th century, technological advances made canned soup possible. Since then, soup has become more accessible than ever. Just visit a nearby grocery store, and you’ll find dozens of soups from as many countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia. This soup season, maybe you can find a new one to try.
