An Exaltation of Soups (3 page)

Second, our ancestors might have used the “hot stone” method. First you dig a hole or find one, and fill it with water. Then you build a fire close by and heat stones in it. Then, one by one, and v-e-r-y carefully, you transfer the stones to the water until it boils. And it will. Stones can be heated to a temperature of 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit in a well-laid hearth. How do I know that? Because in 1954, archeologist Michael J. O’Kelly proved it in experiments with his students at primeval Irish sites: “They used the hearths to heat stones, used a dampened wooden shovel to dump them in the water, brought the water to a boil, and simmered a 10-pound leg of mutton for 3 hours 40 minutes by adding stones every few minutes…. Then they ate the results: ‘excellently cooked and most tasty.’ ”
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After those first catch-as-catch-can soups of wild plants and animals, and after vast fields of grain sprang up in Europe and Asia, it turned out to be grains and beans—early man’s first agricultural triumphs in Neolithic times—that went into soup. By 7000
B.C.E.
, Emmer wheat had been domesticated in Turkey, and barley, millet, and beans in Greece. By 5000
B.C.E.
, rice was being cultivated in China. These were the stuff of early soups. And, of course, these remain our most revered modern comfort foods. Read on.

G
RAINS COOKED IN BROTH
continue to be lovingly prepared in most cultures: porridges and gruels from ground wheat; couscous soups and farina soups; barley soups and
tsampas;
oatmeal soups and rice congee. Imagine the astonished look on ancient man’s face when he first witnessed the miracle of chemistry—when heating
caused these cereal grains to release starch granules into the broth and make it thick.

Bean/pea soup was in vogue long before Esau sold his birthright for it (that biblical “mess of pottage” was lentil soup), and it is an established part of every cuisine in the world without exception—every one! From
feijoada
in Brazil, to
huku ne dovi
in Zimbabwe, to
misoshiru
in Japan, and everything in between.

And then there’s the ancient variation of ground wheat made into a bread that turns so hard without today’s modern preservatives that it can be made edible again only by pouring boiling broth over it. I know this bread from the years I spent living in Morocco: that marvelous freshly baked
kisra—a
thick Frisbee of chewy bread—would turn to stone in twenty-four hours. This is called “sop” when dunked in hot liquid and is the origin of our words soup,
soupe, sup, sopa, soppe, zuppe, shorba, çorbasi.
This combination is the basis of Portuguese
sopa secos
and
asordas;
Arabic
shorbas;
Spanish garlic soup; French panades, onion soup, and
garbure;
Italian
aquacotta;
Danish
ollebrod
, Estonian
leivasupp
, and French
l’aïgo boulido.
You’ll find an Egyptian
fatta
soup whose very name means to break crisped pita bread into food.

So there you have it. This part of our everyday cuisine, this soup that we take so much for granted, began life as a miracle of intellection, kept humankind alive through extremes of privation over the ages, and now serves to bind our common humanity, nurse our ills, and mark life’s passages.

When I ponder soup, I think of ancient Tollund Man, dug out of a Danish peat bog in the 1950s and perfectly preserved. He’d been ritually sacrificed to the gods—strangled—but first given a fine last meal, still intact in his stomach. What was it? You know what it was: it was soup. A thick soup of grain and weed seeds ground in a hand mill and boiled.

P
HEW
. T
EN SOUP PROVERBS
from as many different countries. Proverbs sure are funny things. You wouldn’t believe the ink exhausted by scholars of proverbs (yes, they do exist and are called paremiologists) just trying to define the damn things:

Paremiologically speaking, here’s my favorite, from Bartlett Jere Whiting’s
The Nature of the Proverb:
“A proverb is an expression which, owing its birth to the people, testifies to its origin in form and phrase. It expresses what is apparently a fundamental truth—that is, a truism—in homely language, often adorned, however, with alliterations and rhyme. It is usually short, but need not be; it is usually true, but need not be. Some proverbs have both a literal meaning and a figurative meaning, either of which makes perfect sense; but more often they have but one of the two.”

In short, there’s a lot of soup in them thar proverbs and a lot of proverbs about soup, and I think there’s good reason why.

Let me take you back in the history of the world. It wasn’t always like it is now, people hunched in front of computers munching on take-out pizzas and creating high-tech proverbs about “garbage in, garbage out.” Stay with me here.

Once upon a time, people came home to a hearth and a cooking pot and made conversation in flickering firelight about the events of the day. Young people would speak up naively or impatiently, “I can’t
believe
the corn hasn’t started sprouting!” Older folks would philosophically gaze into the simmering dinner, thinking about the unsprouting corn and their own hunger, and opine, “A watched pot never boils.” Bingo, proverb.

It’s nice to think about, isn’t it—that time of apparently slower natural rhythms? When was the last time you gathered things from the garden, built a fire, brought water to a boil, and, hungry and expectant, thought about how these processes spoke to the larger questions that tug at the heartstrings of mankind? There is something beautiful about rituals building metaphors for life and finding room for reflection.

As Mr. Whiting said, though, some proverbs are just talking about that liquid stuff in a bowl, pure and simple:

Other proverbs are still about soup pure and simple, but they imply other things, too:

And then there are those proverbs that, with a leap of imagination, use the image of soup to express a truth that really has nothing to do with soup at all: