An Exaltation of Soups (2 page)

T
O MY MIND
, when you talk about soup, you’re talking about so much more than a mostly liquid way of filling your stomach.

Consider the story of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at dinner in Japan with Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki. Mrs. Gandhi was served a clear soup in a dark bowl painted inside with pictures of the bamboo tree. Only a few vegetables and a single pigeon egg were floated in the broth, leaving the bowl’s design visible. Mr. Suzuki asked her what she thought of the presentation. Instantly Mrs. Gandhi replied: “To my eyes, it [the egg] is a full moon shining over a dark forest on a clear night.” Prime Minister Suzuki sat up straight, completely amazed at her spontaneous and accurate reply.

I like this story a lot because it captures in one fell swoop all the layers of purpose held in a bowl of soup: its edibility, yes, but also its intrinsic beauty, its identification with specific cultures, its universality, and its resonance on the most basic levels.

After all, what is the broth but salt and water—the sea, the source of all life? What are the ingredients in the soup but fauna and flora that man, oh so painfully and over millennia, domesticated, tamed, made his own, and sacrificed as food for his own survival? The soup served by Suzuki was quintessentially Japanese, symbolizing that country’s cultural aesthetic and Buddhist values, and at the same time universal, so that it could evoke Mrs. Gandhi’s intuitive reaction.

Look at a bowl of soup and see the evolution of foods created in remote locations over thousands and thousands of years, made into recipes passed from hand to hand, transported on the backs of Indian, Asian, and Arab traders, Roman soldiers, and European explorers, all the way to your supermarket.

Eat a bowl of soup and savor mouthfuls of human resolve since Neolithic times to bring warmth, health, and richness into the lives of their family members, their tribe, their community, their culture.

Consider a bowl of soup from any culture, and think how it came to reflect that specific people, their times of celebration, their passages of life, their most intimate life experiences.

That’s what
An Exaltation of Soups
is all about. In these pages are the stories and recipes of both soups and soup traditions that most profoundly connect people all over the world. I began the collection many years ago out of sheer love of food and, yes, sheer love of research, too. An initial batch of interesting soup recipes evolved into a loose-leaf cookbook on top of my refrigerator, and this grew thick with notes and glosses as I stumbled over stories and histories and quotes that illustrated the soups and their ingredients. Over time, this raggy book seemed to take on a life of its own, naturally shaping itself into storied recipes that gave insight into the cultures from which they sprang. And when I translated it in 1997 into an ordered website at
www.soupsong.com
, the floodgates opened: readers from around the world commented on, corrected, refined, and authenticated my materials. It’s been a long, rewarding journey for me, really an exaltation of good food, good friends, warmth, and insight—an exaltation of soup. I hope you find in this book the long-lost recipe of the soup your great-great-grandmother used to make to celebrate a family wedding, and I hope you find a wealth of other recipes that will inspire you to share warmth, food, and fellowship with all the people in your life.

“AMAZING SOUP”

—J
ERRY
N
EWMAN
,
contemporary Canadian poet and novelist

S
TONE
A
GE PEOPLE
created soup before they had a pot to cook it in, a bowl to serve it in, or a gourd to drink it from.

In fact, it’s not completely clear who first stumbled onto the concept of soup—anthropologists disagree, depending on their interpretation of existing artifacts. Some say it was one of the
Homo sapiens
gang, sometime after 80,000
B.C.E.
—either the Neanderthals or the Cro-Magnons who ultimately did those poor Neanderthals in. Others argue for a later generation—Neolithic man, around 10,000
B.C.E.

I kind of like the Neanderthal theory. It was a particularly tough and dangerous world back then. These hunter-gatherers were stuck in the last blast of an Ice Age that killed off much of their food and many species. It was every man for himself as the Neanderthals ran fearfully from—and ran hungrily after—woolly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, wolves, and other hominids. And yet Neanderthal skeletons have been found in France with teeth worn down below gum level—and deeply crippled skeletons have been found, too. This means that some older or sickly prehistoric men and women were kept alive only through the compassion of their communities and the brilliance of someone who could create hot and soupy food alternatives to incredibly cold indigestible plants and tough meat.

I try to put myself under the toque of that Stone Age Julia Child. I imagine him or her using bark to dip and carry water … putting food in the water and noticing it soften or swell … marking how plants and berries, meat and marrow chunks would infuse the
water with color and flavor. I imagine him or her getting the idea of warming the broth from the warm mother’s milk that kept little Neanderthal babies happy.

Soup! It’s an unbelievable achievement—a matter of thought overreaching what was technologically possible at the time. In the words of anthropologist Sally McBrearty: “The earliest
Homo sapiens
probably had the cognitive capability to invent Sputnik … but didn’t yet have the history of invention or a need for those things.” But soup? Yes, he needed soup. He needed soup, so he imagined soup. He imagined soup, and he brought it into being, despite his lack of pots to cook it in.

In fact, soup turned out to be a transforming concept that changed early man’s relationship to nature, increased his life choices, and created completely new needs and desires. One eon he’s a vegetarian in the garden of Eden, the next he’s scavenging or hunting raw flesh and sucking bone marrow … then, almost suddenly, he’s figured out an unbelievably complex process with tools to produce a hot meal. It’s a gastronomic miracle, and it’s art: multiple colors, multiple textures, multiple flavors—something created by man that had never existed before in the history of the world.

But how on earth could early man in 10,000
B.C.E.
, at the latest, have boiled things … without the pottery that he finally created in 6000
B.C.E.
and the cauldrons that followed in 3600
B.C.E.
?

I propose two theories.

First, prehistoric man might have boiled animals in their skins. He could have flayed his prey, suspending the skin on forked sticks, filling the bag with water and food, and lighting a fire underneath. The skin would not catch fire because it would be cooked by the boiling water on the inside (but don’t try this trick at home). In fact, this technique has been used by many cultures in recorded history, from Scythians in the fifth century
B.C.E.
to Irish and Scots in the sixteenth century.