I Can’t Sleep - Soup | Calm Bedtime Reading

Episode Date: October 29, 2025

Relax with this calm bedtime reading designed to help you drift into restful sleep and ease insomnia. In this gentle episode, discover the fascinating history of soup — from ancient broths to modern comfort bowls — while your mind unwinds. Benjamin’s soothing narration blends education and relaxation, offering a peaceful space for learning without whispering or hypnosis. It’s the perfect way to calm your thoughts, ease anxiety, and settle into a deep, refreshing night’s rest. Press play, close your eyes, and drift off as you learn about the world’s favorite warm meal. Happy sleeping! Read with permission from Soup, Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to a Glassbox Media podcast. What if I told you that most of the modern day self-help advice you've been hearing could actually make you worse? The key to a better life isn't about feel-good gimmicks that sound catchy. The Mentally Stronger Podcast gives you access to a licensed therapist who shares science-backed tools that will actually change your life. Hi, I'm Amy Morin, psychotherapist, mental strength trainer, and international best-selling author. In each episode, we cover research-back strategies, like how to stop relying on willpower and start creating habits for lasting change. And the five mental strength-building exercises you can do from your couch. I also speak to world-class experts like Dr. Nicole Kane, who shares how to permanently heal anxiety by addressing the root cause.

With over 200 episodes in our catalog, this podcast is for you if you're ready to crush self-doubt, conquer challenges, become stronger than ever with therapist-approved strategies that can change your life. Listen to Mentally Stronger with Therapist Amy Morin, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the I Can't Sleep podcast, where I help you drift off, one fact at a time. I'm your host, Benjamin Boster. And today's episode is about soup. Soup is a primarily liquid food, generally served warm or hot. though it is sometimes surf chilled made by cooking or otherwise combining meat or vegetables with stock milk or water according to the oxford companion to food soup is the main generic term for liquid savory dishes

others include broth piss consummate potage and many more the consistency of soups varies from thin to thick some soups are light and delicate. Others are so substantial that they verge on bean stews. Although most soups are savory, sweet soups are familiar in some parts of Europe. Soups have been made since prehistoric times and have evolved over the centuries. The first soups were made from grains and herbs. Later, legumes, other vegetables, meat or fish were added. Originally, Soaps referred to pieces of bread covered with savory liquid. Gradually, the term soup was transferred to the liquid itself. Soups are common to the cuisines of all continents

and have been served at banquets as well as in peasant homes. Some soups have been the primary source of nourishment for poor people in many places. In times of hardship, soup kitchens have provided sustenance for the hungry. Some soups are found in recognizably similar forms in the cuisines of many countries and regions. Chicken soups and oxdale soups are known around the world. Others remain almost entirely exclusive to their region of origin. The term soup or words like it can be found in many languages. According to the Oxford companion to food, soup is the most general of the terms which apply to liquid savory dishes.

Other terms embraced by soup include broth, bisque, bullion, consummate, potage, and many more. According to the lexicographer John Ido, the etymological idea underlying the word soup is that of soaking. In his 2012, the diners dictionary, Ido writes that the word dates back to an unrecorded post-classical Latin verb, soupare, to soak. which was derived from the prehistoric Germanic root soup, which also produced the English sap and supper. The term passed into Old French as soap, S-O-U-P-E, meaning a piece of bread soaked in liquid. And by extension, broth poured onto bread.

The earliest recorded use in English of Sop in the first sense dates from 13th. The ancient conjunction of bread and soup still exist, not only in the croutons, often served with soup, and the slice of baguette and greire floating on traditional French onion soup, but also in bread-based soups, including the German schwarzpropa, black bread soup, the Russian Ocruska, and the Italian Papa al-Pomodoro, tomato pulp. The Dictionaire de la Calamé French records the term soup in French use from the 12th century, but adds that it is probably earlier. The Oxford English Dictionary records the use of the word in English in the 14th century. The first known cookery book in English, the form of curry, circa 1390,

refers to several broths, but not to soups. The Oxford companion to food, but, O-C-F comments that soups can stray over what is necessarily an imprecisely demarcated frontier into the realm of stews. The companion adds that this tendency is noticeable among fish soups, such as bouleabas. The Hungarian goulash is regarded by many as a stew, but by others, particularly in Hungary, as a soup. The food writer Harold McGee contrasts soups with sauces on food and food. cooking, commenting that they can be so similar that soups may only be distinguished as less intensely flavored, permitting them to be eaten as a food in themselves, not an accent.

Before the invention of boiling and water, cooking was limited to simple heating and roasting. The making of soup or something akin has been dated by some writers back to the upper Paleolithic between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago. Some archaeologists conjecture that early humans employed hides in water-tied baskets to boil liquids. According to a study by the academic Garrett C. Van Dyck, the first soup may have been made by Neanderthals, boiling animal bones and drinking the broth. Archaeological evidence for bone broths has been found in sites from Egypt to China. In 1988, the food writer M.F.K. Fisher commented,

it is impossible to think of any good meal, no matter how plain or elegant, without soup or bread in it. It is almost as hard to find any recorded menu, ancient, or modern, without one or both. Methods of making soup evolved from one culture to another. The first soups were made from grains and herbs, later peas, beans, beans, other vegetables, pasta, meat, or fish were added. In her 2010 work, soup, a global history, Janet Clarkson writes that the ancient Romans had a great variety of soups. De Re Cochinaria, on the subject of cooking,

a collection of Roman recipes compiled in the fourth or fifth century from earlier manuscripts, gives details of numerous ingredients, mostly vegetable. In European and Arab cuisines, soups continue to feature after the fall of the Roman Empire. Clarkson writes that the earliest known German cookery book, The Book Funguta Spisa, Book of Good Food, published in about 1345, includes recipes for many soups, including one made with beer and caraway seeds, another with leeks, almond milk and rice meal, others with carrots and almond milk or goose cooked in broth with garlic and saffron. The early 15th century French book Dufe de Cuisine from the kitchen has many recipes for pottages and sobs, including several regional variants. During the 17th century, the soup itself, rather than the sobs it contained,

became seen as the most important element of the dish. One of the most famous cookery books of its time was Robert May's The Accomplished Cook, 1660. Clark's in comments that about a fifth of May's recipes are for soups of one kind or another. The Huang Dinejing, a Chinese medical text, describes the preparation of soups and clear liquids by steaming rice and recommends soups as medicine. In the 18th century, meals at Grand European tables were still served in the style that had persisted since the Middle Ages, with successive courses of three or four dishes placed on the table simultaneously, and then replaced by three or more contrasting dishes.

Soup was typically part of the first course. Exceptionally, at particularly grand dinners, a first course might consist of four different soup, succeeded by four dishes of fish and then four of meat. In the early 19th century, a new style of dining became fashionable in Europe and elsewhere. Service a La Rus, Russian-style service. Dishes were served one at a time, usually beginning with soup. In the OCEF, Alan Davidson writes that although soup is now typically served as the first of several courses in western menus,

In many places around the world, substantial soups have historically been an entire meal for poor people, particularly in rural areas. Many Russian peasants subsisted on rye bread and soup made from pickled cabbage. Charitable soup kitchens preparing soup and supplying it to the needy, either free or to very low charge, or known in the Middle East in the 16th century. From the late 18th centuries, soup kitchens were, set up in Germany, France, England, and elsewhere. In the 1840s, the chef Alexis Sawyer established a soup kitchen in the east end of London

to feed Ugano Silkweavers impoverished by cheap imports. During the Irish famine, which began in 1845, he set up a kitchen in Dublin capable of feeding a thousand people an hour. In the United States, soup kitchens were set up in the 1870s. During the Great Depression, Al Capone established and sponsored a soup kitchen in Chicago. In the same period, the Salvation Army ran similar operations elsewhere in the U.S. and in Canada, Australia, and Britain. In Asian countries, soup became a familiar breakfast dish, but has not, according to Clarkson, done so in the West. In China and Japan, soup came to have a different place in meals.

as in the west there was a distinction between thick and thin soups but the latter would often be treated as a beverage to be drunk from the bowl rather than eaten with a spoon in japan miso soup became the best known of the thick type with many variations on the basic theme of dashi a stock made from kombu edible seaweed and dried fermented tuna with miso fermented soybean paste Clarkson writes, Meso soup is the traditional breakfast soup in the ordinary home, and the traditional end to a formal banquet. Ramen, a noodle soup, popular in Japan and latterly internationally, is documented only from the second half of the 19th century. In China, soups wholly unknown in the West were developed,

including birds' nest and sharks' fin soups. Snake soup continues to be an iconic. tradition in Cantonese culture and that of Hong Kong. In China, rad soup is considered the equal of ox tail soup. Indian cuisine includes rossum, sometimes called pepper water, a thin spicy soup typically made with lentils, tomatoes, and seasonings, including tamarind, pepper, and chilies. The Thai cuisine, gangchid, are soups. The most popular are Tom Yongkong Kung, made with prawns, and Tom Kaagai made with Kalungal, chicken, and coconut milk. Fu is a Vietnamese soup usually made from beef stock and spices with noodles and thinly sliced

beef or chicken added. In Filipino cookery, Sinigong is a soup made with meat, shrimp, or fish, and flavored with a sour ingredient, such as tamar and guava. Also from the Philippines is Coloretta, a goat soup. The soups of Indonesia include Soto-Ayam, chicken, soap udang, shrimp with rice vermicelli, and soap capiting, crab. Karudia is a soup served in the Maldives, with chunks of tuna in it.

Two soups from Armenia are a cucumber and yogurt soup called Jajik and Bojib and Bojib, containing lamb and fruit. Dushbarah is a dumpling soup from Azerbaijan. Tibetan cooking include Tsamsug, made from grains, butter, soya and cheese. An Iranian summer soup, Mastokia is made with yogurt, cucumber, and mint. Turkish Kaleepacha is made from the meat from animal heads and feed. Tahanah, one of the oldest traditional Turkish soups, is made by mixing.

seen in fermenting yogurt, cereal flowers, and a variety of cooked vegetables, producing a soup with a sour and acidic tang and a yeasty flavor. Also from Turkey is the Yaila Chorbasi, a yogurt soup with rice or barley. Like chicken soup, it has curative properties ascribed to it by some. From the 16th century onwards, Paris was known for its street vendor's selling soup. And in mid-19th century Paris, Laal, the large central food market, became known for its stalls selling onion soup, was a substantial topping of grated cheese, put under a grill, and served out-graden. This gardenet-de-zal transcended class distinctions, becoming the breakfast of the Ford de Zal, the workers responsible for transporting the goods.

and a restorative for the party people leaving the cabarets of paris late at night the many cuisines of europe have made a range of soups among the soups of italy are minestrone zupapaveze and strachatella respectively a vegetable broth consummate from poached eggs and a meat broth with eggs and cheese from belgium there are portage le joie a peathe a peat a pea and bean soup, and soup chanches, a vegetable soup with fine vermicelli and milk. Bulgarian cuisine includes tarotour, a cold yogurt and cucumber soup. Dutch soups include Erdn's soup, a split pea soup, and brown and bonon soup, a brown bean soup eaten with rye bread and bacon. A soup from the Faroe Islands is Rakhud, made with dried mudden. Herban Zupa Michfenzorren is a German split pea soup with pigsier. Zivia soup, a Latvian fish soup, incorporates whole pieces of cooked fish with potato.

The Finnish kessikato is a light summer soup of seasonal vegetables, cooked in milk and water. The Swedish tritsopa is a light, a meat and vegetable soup. The Norwegian bloom co-pureae is a cauliflower soup with egg yolks and cream. Geheck from Luxembourg is made with pork offal and finished with prunes soaked in local white wine. Maltese soups include Sapa Tal Arnla, widow's soup made with green and white vegetables and garnished with a poached egg and cheese. and Alyota, a light fish soup flavored with garlic and marjoram. Two soups from Poland are Hwadnik, a crayfish and beadrobed soup served chilled,

and Grukuvka, yellow pea soup with barley. Portuguese soups include kanja, chicken, and cul-de-verje, potato and cabbage. Colin Skink, smoked hatick soup and nettle soup, are of soup. Scottish origin. A Welsh soup, cowl, is typically made with lamb or beef together with vegetables, including potatoes, Swedes, and carrots. Slovenian cuisine includes Yuha, a mead and vegetable soup. Russian soups include shi, cabbage soup, Selyanka, vegetable soup with meat or fish, Rassolnik, pickled cucumber soup, and Uyuk. and Uca fish soup.

Arab Shorba typically contains meat and oats. Egyptian food includes milchia, a soup of jute leaves and meat. The Moroccan Harira contains chickpeas, meat, and rice. In Nigeria, according to Davidson, soupy stews or stew-like soups are popular. He gives as examples a goosey soup, often made was offal, palm oil, carib, lemon basil, and a goosey powder, and various okra soups. He adds that in Nigeria, soup made from goat is so important that it is usually served at the most important functions. In a safari of African cooking, 1971, Bill Adardy also highlights goat soup from Liberia.

Other Nigerian soups include the spinach-based soup EFO. A study in 2025 reported that despite their nutritional richness and cultural importance, traditional soups were declining in popularity, particularly among younger generations and in urban areas. Soups from other parts of Africa include cheruba, a lamb and vegetable soup with lima beans and chickpeas. from North Africa. A West African specialty is ground nut soup. A Benkwan from West Africa is a soup of crab meat, pulp palm nuts, and lamb.

East African cuisine includes bean soup with tomato, onion, pepper, and curry powder. Supuya papaya from Tanzania is a cream soup containing papaya and onion. A Congolese green green papaya, Paya soup is made with bacon fat, chicken broth, milk, and red pepper. South African soups include curried snook head soup. A 2014 study records a Ghanzan, I haven't eaten if I don't have my soup in fu-fu,

a dough of pounded cocoa yam and cassava. The soup is typically based on okra. Soups from the Americas include a spiny lobster soup, from Belize, Cajun crayfish, Bisk, and gumbo, a hearty soup or stew, traditionally made from meat or shellfish with tomatoes, vegetables, herbs, and spices, thickened with okra. In the Caribbean and Latin America, Sancochu is a thick soup typically consisting of meat, tubers, and other vegetables. In the Western cuisine of the 20th and 21st centuries, there have been and are numerous soups.

Auguste Escoffier divided them into two main types. Clear soups, which include plain and garnish consummate, six soups which comprise the purees, velouté, and creams. He added a third class, which is independent of either of the above. and that it forms part of plain household cookery embraces vegetable soups in garbura or gratinade soups. But important dinners, by this, I mean rich dinners, only the first two classes are recognized.

Luis Solnier's Le Repetoire de la Cuisine, first published in 1914, contained six pages of details of potages, clear soups, two pages on soups, moistened with water, milk, or thin white stock, eight pages on velutees, soups thickened with egg yolks, and cream, thickened with double cream, as well as a further three pages on 53 foreign soups. Food preservation has, in Clarkson's phrase, always been a preoccupation of the human animal, allowing food to be kept for long periods. In her domestic cookery, 1806, Maria Rundle gave a recipe for portable soup, a very useful thing, highly concentrated meat stock, that set to a solid consistency.

For a bowl of soup, it was only necessary. necessary to dissolve some in hot water. By the beginning of the 19th century, the Royal Navy had been victualling its ships with portable soup for some years. Recipes were published under many names. Clarkson lists veal glue, cake soup, cake gravy, broth cakes, solid soup, portmanteau potage, pocket soup, carry soup, and soup always in readiness. In 1810, Peter Durand, an English inventor, was granted a patent for the first tin can for soup. The first commercial canning factory opened in England in 1813.

It had a capacity of only six cans an hour. Each can was cut by hand, filled, and the lid soldered on individually. With advances in technology, the canning of food had expanded by the end of the century, and companies such as Heinz were promoting their soups as gourmet products, indistinguishable from homemade versions. Canine made soup readily available, easily transportable, long-lasting, and convenient. In 1997, Heinz's rival Campbell's,

introduced condensed canned soups to be diluted with water to produce double the volume. According to the food historian Ray Tannahill, tomato soup was not popular in the U.S. or Britain until Campbell's began marketing it.