Soup began as the bread, not the broth poured over it
The word soup once named a slice of bread soaked in liquid, not the liquid itself. That old pairing survives in croutons and in the cheesy baguette floating on French onion soup. The dish may be far older than the word: one researcher suggests Neanderthals boiled bones and drank the broth.
According to the lexicographer John Ayto, the root idea behind soup is soaking. He traces it to an unrecorded late Latin verb, suppare, built on a prehistoric Germanic root that also gave English sup and supper. Old French soupe meant bread steeped in liquid and then broth poured over bread, and over time the name slid from the sop to the liquid. French records show soupe from the twelfth century, and English from the fourteenth, yet The Forme of Cury, the earliest English cookbook, written around 1390, lists broths and no soups at all.
Boiling itself was a breakthrough. Before it, cooking meant heating or roasting. Some writers push soup-like cooking back into the Upper Palaeolithic, a span running from roughly 50,000 to 12,000 years before now, and some archaeologists think early people boiled liquids in hides or tightly woven baskets. Garritt C. Van Dyk's study proposes Neanderthals as the first soup makers, and traces of bone broth turn up at sites from Egypt to China.
Early versions used grains and herbs, with peas, beans, meat, fish and later pasta joining over time. Janet Clarkson notes the Romans had many kinds, and the recipe collection De re coquinaria, compiled in the fourth or fifth century, lists mostly vegetable ingredients. Soup has fed banquets and peasants alike, and in hard times soup kitchens have kept the hungry alive.
Where soup stops is genuinely unclear. The Oxford Companion to Food admits the border with stew is fuzzy, especially for fish dishes such as bouillabaisse, and Hungarians tend to insist that goulash is a soup when outsiders call it a stew. Harold McGee argues soups differ from sauces mainly by being milder, mild enough to be a meal rather than an accent. The food writer M. F. K. Fisher claimed in 1988 that almost no menu in history lacks soup or bread.
Source: Soup
