In this anthology of writings about — and recipes for — soup, historian Eileen White has selected texts that explains the place of soup in the diet of the British Isles alongside recipes which can be tried today (and just a few that are better to read than to cook) The material covers earliest references to the end of the Victorian period.



Soup was never intended as a stand-alone dish. At its first showing it was merely the broth from a stew: the meat served in one dish, the liquid in another – we are familiar with the idea from the French ‘pot-au-feu’ or ‘bouillabaisse’. And the very word ‘soup’ referred to the ‘sops’ of bread put at the bottom of the dish to soak up and thicken the liquor. The myriad flavours of modern soups are something truly new: brown soup, green soup and white soup were just about the limit of invention in the eighteenth century, even if they did know about ‘portable’ or ‘pocket’ soup cubes, anticipating our packets and our pots.

Eileen White