FACTORALY - E79 SOUP

Episode Date: March 13, 2025

Soup is one of the easiest things to make from scratch; it's even easier in a can, or you can just add boiling water to a packet!This episode looks at various varieties of soups, where they came from and how they got into space! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

hello bruce hello simon how are you today i'm feeling replete how are you replete that's a great word to kick things off, isn't it? Yes, it is. It's a lovely word. I'm getting this thing which sends me a word a day, sort of like to build up my vocabulary. The trouble is, every time it shows me a word, I go, yeah, I know that one. Yes. Yes. My issue with that would be, yes, every time you show me a new word, I forget the one from yesterday. Yeah, that's true. You have to have used it a lot yesterday yeah absolutely yeah yeah it'll probably just end up being a one-time use and then never again especially if it's replete where are we what are we doing where am i well i'm here you're there um and this is fact orally so bruce and i are

professional voiceover artists. Hello. Hello. And we talk about stuff for a living. We do. We try and encourage people to do things, buy things, appreciate things, understand things. Exactly. Very good summarisation to put on the CV. And when we're not doing that, we come here, we pick an interesting topic, hopefully interesting. If it's not interesting, we'll be darn sure to make it interesting. No, I see I go the other way. I would much rather pick something that was extremely dull and boring.

Yes. And then try and make that interesting. It's more of a challenge. It's much more of a challenge. And also, it means that they're only half an hour long as opposed to ages and ages. And then, you know, the editing takes, I don't know, time and you'd have to tell me a while a while sometimes but that's um that's the synopsis we love facts we talk about facts you listen to us talking about facts we all chance today, Bruce? Yes.

I thought so. Can you cook? I can boil a tin of soup. Okay. You know, you don't have to boil a tin of soup. I was going to say, and that's probably wrong because you're not supposed to heat it that high, are you? You don't have to.

It's already cooked. Yes, exactly. Yes. But I can cook. Good. In fact, in lockdown, I created some videos of how to cook various soups, including vichyssoise and Jewish chicken soup. Oh, lovely.

Yes, so I think you're probably going to be a bit more of an expert on this topic than myself. I'll start with something that I found out. Etymology, as always, it's a good place to start. The word soup comes, as one would probably expect, from the French, because the French seem to do quite well in their soup, don't they? Well, they're the reason why we call beef, beef, not cow.

Yes. And pork, pork, not pig. And all that kind of stuff yes yes exactly thank you french well done thanks for screwing up our language but they gave us good castles so you know and decent cooking yeah exactly yeah exactly complain so it's fine um so old english So, Old English, saup, came from Old French, soup, which came from Latin, soupa, spelt S-U-P-P-A. And that related to the word sop, sopping wet. And a soupa was a piece of bread dipped in some form of liquid food. Right. As you would use.

Like a crouton. As opposed to a crouton which is crispy this actually refers to a piece of bread that's soggy with broth and that was much like a bread bowl oh a bowl made out of bread that you put stuff in yes i know what you mean yeah yes yeah come on to those later oh good um and the word soup via supper is also related to sip and sup and supper. Okay. So it's all to do with liquid and drinking, consuming liquid. Right.

How old is soup? I mean, not the one you've got in the cupboard, but generally speaking, how long have we had soup? I think we've probably had soup an awful lot longer than we can prove. Good. But I'm imagining there would be Chinese soups going back an awful long way and almost like sort of proto-human soups and things. Yes, yes, I would imagine that's so. I found a little bit of evidence that suggests um it goes back to the late stone age okay 50 odd thousand years ago 50 000 yeah wow well somewhere between 10 000 and 50 000 it's a

big fake because i i have my first soup that's actually provable as soup um in 6000 bc okay and that was hippo soup although apparently the Chinese go back to 20,000 BC. Okay, that's even better. Yeah. So that's the early soups. Yes. Then what happened? We go through a nasty bit of history where no one really talks about soup for a while,

but we have to assume that it's still there um it was popular in in medieval times sort of a brothy stewy there seems to be quite a narrow line between what's a soup and what's a broth and what's a stew um broth i believe refers to the purely to the water if you boil ingredients in water and take the ingredients out that water is the broth yeah you can then add ingredients to that broth to make soup and then something else happens and it becomes a stew i'm not quite sure where the distinction is between those two must be the amount of liquid yeah probably yeah i found a reference to um 16th century fr, where the word restaurant first came up. And it actually referred to soup. Oh, right. Restaurant being a restorer.

Yes. Restorer of your energy and giver of vigor and health. And that's what soup does. That's what soup does. So that was what soup was. It was called restaurant. You'd have a bowl of restaurant. Okay. In 1765, a French fellow opened up a shop to sell the aforementioned restaurant. And the shop became known as restaurant because he's selling soup. And that's how we get restaurants.

Ah. Yeah. There must have been soup in the 14th century. Probably. Because that's when they the 14th century. Probably. Because that's when they invented the soup spoon. Okay. Because, you know, there's Elizabethan roughs. Yes.

It's very difficult not to spill soup on your rough. Sure, yeah. Unless you can convey it to your mouth in sort of small measures rather than just kind of like tipping the bowl up. Oh. So the soup spoon was invented to save your rough. Really? Yes. That's fantastic.

Wow. Okay, well, yeah, so it must have been popular then. Otherwise, they wouldn't have bothered. Exactly. Do you eat soup or drink soup? Depends how thick it is, I would say. It depends on where you are. Does it?

Yeah. Oh, go on. Arabs drink soup. Right. And most people eat soup in the rest of the world. How interesting. Does it? Yeah. Oh, go on. Arabs drink soup. Right. And most people eat soup in the rest of the world. How interesting. And I mean, I think you're right.

I think it depends on whether it's a broth or whether it's more substantial. But I would say drinking soup. I remember having a flask of hot tomato soup when going out to fireworks nights as a kid. Yes. And we would definitely drink it. Yes. No eating involved. There you go.

But if you have a big fishy bowl of Cullen's skink or a scotch broth or something like that that has things in it that require chewing, I'd say that is eating. Because chowder is another thing. Chowder was a general term for a soup made by sailors. All right. And generally chowder was eaten or drunk. Consumed. Let's say consumed in a bread bowl. Was it?

Which you mentioned earlier. Yes. So it goes back to 1427, the first record of a bread bowl. Right. And this is something which is done in Ireland it's kind of a way of making things stretch, a bit like Yorkshire

pudding, so you put the soup into a bowl made of a round piece of bread hollow out the middle then sailors went to America and specifically to San Francisco and they took this idea of the sourdough ball, which is now a thing in San Francisco,

which is you have chowder in a bread bowl. Really? Yeah. I thought that was just a trendy new invention. It's a bit hoxton, isn't it? Getting expensive pubs. Yeah, I was going to say, it's a little bit East London, yeah. No, no, it goes back to the 15th century.

Fantastic. Then, of course, we get into the realm of mass-produced, commercially available tinned soup. Would you say a tin of soup or a can of soup? I would say a can of soup. Okay, fine. The canning process came about in the 1800s during the Industrial Revolution

and that suddenly made things like soup, amongst other products, more readily available, more mass-producible and therefore you could have a standardised recipe shipped out to the millions. One of the first, I hadn't,

I think in this country we are particularly dominated by heinz soup oh don't let baxter's hear you say that no i did think of your poor dog so my dog baxter is named after baxter's soup oh is he actually yeah yeah yeah i didn't know that but um the thing about making tin soup or canned soup is it's actually cooked in the tin. It goes into the tin raw. Oh. I mean, apart from like a soup base, which is like a stock, the actual ingredients like the vegetables or the bits of meat or whatever else goes in there,

it goes in there raw. And then the cooking process happens inside the can. So everything that's in a can of soup is already cooked. You don't need to cook tinned soup because it's already done yes you're not cooking it you're heating it if you want to have it hot you could have it cold and call it gazpacho or even gazpacho i thought it had an eye in it is it not gazpacho no well we are learning some things today, aren't we? Heinz tomato soup was first introduced into the UK. It was a very posh thing. It was introduced at Fortnum's in 1910.

No way, really? It was Canadian originally. Heinz cream of tomato soup was originally a Canadian dish. And it was imported after the First World War. And then it was so successful in the UK that Heinz opened a factory in London specifically to make Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup. And then they made other things at the factory. But that was the primary thing. How many tins do you reckon they sold of Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup in the last 100 years? Because it's been going since 1910. You know, I tried to find this out. I wanted to see who made

more cans of soup per year. And I found one source that said the number of cans of soup sold by Heinz is not publicly available. Well, there is a statistic, which is that Heinz cream of tomato soup in the UK they've sold 8.2 billion tins of soup billion billion crikey that's a lot of tins of tomato soup it is a lot of soup wow as opposed to Baxter's who's slightly different yes Baxter's is a lovely story that it's generally been run by women so there was Ethel Baxter and then Ina Baxter and then Audrey Baxter. They've all run the company. And they have a royal warrant.

They've been going since 1868. Have they? Yeah. And they originally made jam and jelly and things like that. And then they switched to soup in 1929. And the first soup that they made was called the Royal Game Soup and it used Speyside venison.

Oh, nice. They sponsored the Loch Ness Marathon. I thought you were going to say the Loch Ness Monster. No, just the marathon. And it's obviously eaten by the king.

Right. Or drunk by the king, whichever way you look at it. So that was in 1868 yes one year earlier than heinz oh so henry heinz started uh packaging foodstuffs of different varieties in 1869 how many varieties i'll come on to that he was based in penn in America from German parents, and they were packaging already available foodstuffs. Their first product that they actually made was horseradish sauce. The company went bankrupt in 1875 and then reformed.

Henry Hines brought his brother and his cousin on board, and they started sort of expanding a little bit. The 57 Varieties slogan came out in 1896, and apparently this was inspired by a sign that Henry Hines saw advertising 21 styles of shoes in a clothing store. So it's completely made up. It's just marketing. Completely made up. Apparently Henry Hines' lucky number was five yes and his wife's was seven so they put the two together and made

57 totally made up so they made horseradish then they moved into ketchup then they moved into salad cream they didn't start doing soup until 1930 ah so the company had been around for sort of 60 odd years yes by the time they started going on to soup. Apparently, Heinz is the most popular brand of soup in the UK. Sorry, Baxter. But not as popular in America as Campbell's. I don't really know much about Campbell's. I'm not sure I'd even realized it was an American brand.

I thought it was another Scottish one. Really? With a name like Campbell. Despite Andy Warhol? Oh, that's true yeah so condensed soup yes the reason it's condensed it was condensed by a guy called dr john t torrance and they started in 1897 and they decided to start to um condense it because it made it cheaper and not necessarily cheaper

in terms of ingredients but cheaper to transport okay because you only had because the tins were half the size because you had to add your own water yes okay yeah so you could transport the same amount of finished soup in half the space required okay Okay. So it became cheaper to actually produce. Well, that makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, you know, Campbell's soup is fairly inexpensive. Unless, of course, you go to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and want to buy one of the tins of Campbell's soup there.

Yes, that is different. People don't really look at it. But if you look at the Campbell's soup, the series that Andy Warhol produced, they're all the different types of soup. How are they? It's not the same soup. They're all different. Brilliant. And so he started off by hand painting them.

Yeah. And then he started to screen print them, which meant that he could mass produce. And then started to sell those mass productions in much the same way as his Marilyn Monroe series. Yeah, sure. Although the Marilyn Monroe were all the same picture, whereas the same way as his Marilyn Monroe series. Yeah, sure. Although the Marilyn Monroe were all the same picture, whereas the Campbell's soup were all different pictures.

Can you imagine hand painting a whole load of different tins of Campbell's condensed soups? That's crazy. I know. In fact, the belief was that that series started the pop art movement.

Right. So that was where the pop art movement. Right. So that was where pop art came from. Wow, okay. It was from soup. From soup, wow. Yeah. I tried desperately to find out why we call it cream of tomato or cream of mushroom or cream of chicken soup.

Obviously it contains cream. Yes. So that's or cream of chicken soup. Obviously, it contains cream. Yes. So that's a bit of a giveaway. But why cream of? It's not the cream of a tomato. It's not the cream of a mushroom. It's cream and. It's more like cream and.

And I couldn't get a definitive answer. And I was really frustrated. So if any of our dear listeners, the Factoralites, know a conclusive answer, why creamremov, please let us know. Yes, do. You can write to us at hello at factorialy.com. You can leave a pithy message on our Facebook page. All sorts of ways of getting in touch.

You could just shout at us. Yes, you'll see us wandering the streets. Oi, Bruce, I know why it's called cream of. I had a look at a few interesting varieties of soup, or at least varieties with interesting names. Soup is such a ubiquitous thing. It exists in pretty much every culture and every world cuisine.

There isn't, at least I haven't found a country that doesn't have its own variety of soup in some form or another. And some of them have got interesting names. Some of them are made out of interesting things. So I thought I'd just give a little rundown. Mulligatawny soup. Was that named after a person? No. So I'd always thought that Mulligatawny sounded vaguely Scottish.

Or Irish. Or Irish or Celtic or something like that. Mulligan, yeah. Yes, exactly, yeah. Even the word tawny, you know. Yes. It just sounds a little bit Celtic. It's Indian.

Okay. Yeah, it tastes, yes, it's got a sort of curry-ish. It's slightly curry-ish, exactly, yeah. And the name comes from two Tamil words, melagu, meaning black pepper, and taniya, meaning water. Oh. So melagu taniya, malagatoni, is literally pepper water.

Okay. Which is interesting because pepper isn't its main ingredient. It has all sorts of different things in it, and, you know, meat and some vegetable versions but all always sort of tasting slightly curry-esque um and this was very popular in india in the 18th century and then we saw it during the days of the raj and we brought it over here and so it appropriated it yes sure we're inspired by it yes. And brought the recipe home. Another interesting name, Cullen Skink. Yep, love a bit of Cullen Skink.

Which I've actually had in Cullen. So Cullen is a tiny little village in Moray in Scotland. And yeah, it contains haddock, potatoes and onions. Smoked haddock specifically, undyed smoked haddock. Not the bright yellow thing. I can, again, I can make that. Of course you can as i can cockleeky i will come onto that skink this is a confusing thing the word skink

is a scots word for shin or knuckle specifically of beef and therefore it became a generic term for soup in scotland if it contained beef yes and then you go to cullen and they don't use beef they use fish and therefore it's the cullen skink yes and that's why cockaleaky hilarious name cockaleaky it's a scottish name it just refers to the fact that it contains chicken and leeks and and that's that in the caribbean cock soup is is very popular yeah and also it's great fun to bring home as a packet um coccolichi is thickened with barley to make it a bit more substantial one old recipe for coccolichi had prunes in it yes yes prunes are allowed is that how you do it uh i have but i don't normally i think i i just makes it taste not quite right to me. But I've done it.

I have, as I mentioned, done videos. I may, if I'm feeling brave enough, put a link to my YouTube food channel. Do it, do it. Which explains how to make Jewish penicillin. Wonderful. I call it that. Hippocrates mentions chicken soup for respiratory illness it contains an awful lot of things that are very good for you right okay as as elvis

discovered right so elvis between performances would have a bowl of of nice jewish chicken soup would he yeah huh how rock and roll I guess it lubricates the throat and it doesn't make you too fat if you're really quite chubby. Sure, yeah. Which he was. Yeah. So, yeah. So, chicken soup between performances. Wow. In New Jersey, up until 1985, it was illegal to slurp soup in public.

Up until 1985. That's really recent. Yeah. Wow. I mean, it's still not good etiquette. It's frowned upon. No, slurping, isn't it? Although slurping, I would say, makes you look as though you're enjoying it.

Yeah, true. Yeah. And in Nebraska, if you owned a bar in Nebraska, you weren't allowed to sell beer unless you were also brewing a kettle of soup at the same time. Right, okay. But Americans are like that with their laws. There's always something a bit odd. Had to prove you were doing food as well and you weren't just a beer hole.

Yes. And then there's the National Soup Month, of course. Well, of course. Yes. Everything has a month, doesn't it?, of course. Well, of course. Yes. Everything has a month, doesn't it? A national month. It does, yeah. It's January, if you're interested. Is it?

Which makes sense because that's the kind of month when you fancy a bowl of soup. So, you know, nowadays we have these packets of soup and sort of like gnaw. You put in a litre of water and so like nor that these like you put a liter of water and boil for five minutes yeah um that started in japan instant soup did it and it was invented for ramen so effectively kind of like pot noodles yes but 1958 right okay so it was basically it's like a powdered soup you just pour boiling water onto. It cooks the ramen and it makes the soup. Brilliant. So it's very easy.

As opposed to bird's nest soup, which is very difficult. Yeah. Now talk to me about bird's nest. Does it actually contain bird's nest? Yes, it does. Really? So there are little birds called swiftlets. Right.

Basically, they nest on walls and they use saliva to make these little sort of cup-shaped nests which are attached to the wall. And then they lay their eggs in there and they hatch the little swiftlets. Swiftlets. Yes. And then people come along. After the nest is finished with, they chop that down. But it's made of swiftlet saliva. saliva um yes ew let's not go there um so when it's cooked it's got the consistency of like egg whites you know you know like when you have like um a chinese chicken and sweet corn soup

it's got the sort of gloopiness to it yeah it's that kind of effect. Right. But swiftlet saliva bird's nests are very expensive to harvest and to make. Are they? Why? Well, they used to be very rare. But then they decided to start making swiftlet hotels in Malaysia. And you can make an awful lot of money. We have a blog which goes along with this. Oh, yes, we do. And I'll put a video of how to make swiftlet hotels in Malaysia

and how much money they can make from those. Because bird's nest soup is eye-wateringly expensive. It's about 100 quid a bowl. No. Proper bird's nest soup. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. It's really expensive for something that's made of saliva and looks a bit like egg whites. I mean, you're not really selling this to me, Bruce. Am I not? It doesn't sound great to me. Well, you know. I think I'd almost be happier if it was just a good old-fashioned

traditional bird's nest. Take a few sticks in the soup and then take them out again. No, unfortunately not. Astronauts make soup. Do they? Astronauts' favourite soup is pea soup. Oh, OK. It's not made with peas. Why?

Because it's made with pee. Oh, that's disgusting. So there is no waste on a space station. Everything gets recycled, including the water in your sweat, in the air, and you excrete. One of the things you can do with it is you can make um they basically take up with them some cream of tomato but it's freeze-dried and they mix their stored water with this cream of tomato freeze-dried powder to make soup but it is technically pea soup wow yum i mean there are astronauts who got stuck up on the space station who were basically living off soup for quite some time.

If you've got the money to go into space, then obviously, you know, you can freeze dry anything. If you haven't got the money, then you need help with your diet and you need something like a soup kitchen. Oh, yes, soup kitchens. So soup kitchens were started by a chap called Count Rumford. I'll tell you what, I won't do it now. Go to the show notes and you'll get the whole story about how come Count Rumford invented the soup kitchen in the late 1700s. Really? As early as that?

Early as that. And then they kind of went out of fashion. Well, they were made illegal in 1834 in the UK because of the Poor Law Act. They didn't want sort of vagrants gathering around these areas like soup kitchens. So it would sort of give the neighborhood a bad name. They then came back when the Poor Law Act was repealed. But in 1870, they also appeared in the USA. So the first soup kitchens appeared in 1870 they were also appeared in in the usa so the first soup kitchens appeared right in 1870

okay and they were generally sponsored by pub you know people who want who wanted to do good in in the uh neighborhood yeah people like i don't know al capone sure that's who i would automatically think so al capone sponsored several soup kitchens in Chicago. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's good for your rep if you look after your people. So some people would say that, you know, stout is sort of like a soup, isn't it? There's a lot of food in a glass of stout is um is a sort of like a soup isn't it there's a lot of food in in i suppose so yes yes in a glass of stout yeah and one of the most famous stouts is um is obviously uh guinness guinness um i'm just wondering if oh i've just seen what you've done bruce that's terribly clever well done i just wonder if there are any records about soup there are a few records about soup

um the world's largest bowl of soup and i would contest this because it wasn't in a large bowl i'd say more a batch of soup the largest batch of soup ever created in one go was uh 30 292 liters just over 8 000 gallons how many bowls is that a lot uh and this uh this occurred in in turkey only last year in 2024 oh the soup was prepared by 45 chefs and um it took place during the tarana soup festival 2024 oh cool uh the fastest time to alphabetize the contents of a can of alphabet soup. Yep. So alphabet soup, for those who aren't familiar, it's soup that's got little pieces of pasta that are shaped like letters.

And a young fella called Jacob Chandler from Oregon in the USA, in December 2021, he emptied the contents of a can of alphabet soup. He picked through all the letters and he laid them out on a table in alphabetical order in two minutes 8.6 seconds this man has not enough things going on in his life um the most expensive commercially available soup on any restaurant menu you mentioned bird's nest soup yes sort of costing around 100 quid there's a restaurant in mayfair that serves something called buddha jumps over the wall soup okay which is an authentic chinese recipe this this actually exists they haven't just made it jumps over the wall buddha jumps over the wall soup okay i can't find any evidence as to why um but um this particular restaurant in mayfair serves a bowl which costs 108 pounds

and it contains the meat of a sea snail japanese flower mushrooms which is one of the most expensive and high-grade mushrooms around sea cucumbers dried scallops chicken a particular type of ham that comes from a particular type of pig in china that can only be harvested at a particular time of year and ginseng sounds delicious 108 pounds a bowl 108 that's that's one of those sort of bragging rights oh yeah definitely over 100 quid of the soup no just the one bowl i'm sure someone else will come along and just sort of you know dust some gold leaf on top and make it 10109. Yes, yes. That's it. That's all my records.

I've got nothing left. No, that's all. That's it for me. So we would like you very much to like this episode. Yes, we would. We'd like a like. And especially we like a like when it's accompanied by a five-star review. That would be even better. Yes. Wonderful. And then having done so, please feel free to go and share this show with all of your

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