A Bowl of Nourishment For Peasants and Kings --- Soup is a staple of cuisines around the world, whether it's made to tickle a refined appetite or serve as a meal in itself

"Eat more soup. That, in a nutshell -- or a soup bowl -- would be my diet advice for anyone looking for a gentle way to happier eating.

This is a time of year when many of us are looking for ways, large and small, to reset. The danger is that we adopt new regimes so self-punishing that we soon give up and feel worse than before. By contrast, cooking and eating more soup is a way to eat more healthily that you can actually stick to, because it comes without any dreary sense of denial -- especially if you add some buttered toast on the side.

Instead of going on a New Year diet, I try to make January and February a time when I focus on eating more soup, in all its heartiest homemade varieties, from Greek avgolomeno with chicken, rice and lemon to Vietnamese pho with noodles and meat stock. By soup, I don't mean a fat-free cauldron of cabbage soup (though if that delights you, don't let me stop you). Nor do I mean a dainty cup of Vichyssoise or a delicate starter of consomme, as lovely as that may be.

When I say soup, I'm talking about a filling bowl of something thick with noodles, beans, vegetables, herbs and olive oil, and probably topped with Parmigiano -- a kind of what's-in-the-fridge minestrone. I won't call it "chunky," since that word was trademarked by Campbell's in relation to soup in 2019. (Campbell's Chunky soups are currently the market leader in the U.S., and a survey found that 75% of consumers associate the word with soup.) Let's call these concoctions "hearty" instead. At the height of the pandemic, I made and ate versions of this satisfying soup almost every day for lunch and never felt bored. This kind of soup can provide cheer and health-food in a single pot.

If I had to choose one dish to live off for the rest of my life, I would unhesitatingly go for soup. Then again, this might be cheating, because soup is very far from being just one dish. So far as I'm aware, there isn't a single cuisine in the world that doesn't have its own version of soup, and usually dozens of them. Some of the oldest recorded recipes, carved into stone tablets in Babylon more than 4000 years ago, are for simple soups made from herbs, vegetables and various meats boiled in water.

Why eat more soup? For one thing, I can't think of a more appealing delivery system for vegetables. Soup is like salad, but so much more warming and without the virtuous overtones. No other food can make you feel quite so looked after, which is something we could all do with more of. Consider the fact that the word "restaurant" originally referred to a kind of French soup designed to restore those who ate it.

For many of us, soup carries memories of being fed by a parent when we were sick. I no longer crave the canned chicken-noodle or tomato soups that my busy mother often gave me when I was a child. What I do yearn for is the feeling of safety that came from cradling a bowl of something brothy, given to me by a kind person. There is a reason why the popular self-help books are called "Chicken Soup for the Soul." Chicken Salad for the Soul doesn't have quite the same ring.

Another reason to eat more soup is that -- in all its varieties, from cream of pumpkin to French onion -- it has an amazing ability to make us feel full. In 2005, Richard Mattes, a nutrition scientist at Purdue University, published a landmark paper titled "Soup and Satiety." Mattes and his colleagues found that giving people soup satisfied them much more than giving them the same amount of calories in the form of juice. When the subjects in the study drank a glass of apple juice it didn't make them full, but when the same apple juice was heated up and presented as "apple soup," they were still full an hour later. This suggests that it is the idea of soup, as much as anything, that makes us feel nourished.

The original meaning of the word "soup," which is related to the Italian zuppa as well as the French soupe, is broth poured onto bread. At its most basic, soup was not a particular dish but simply the most fundamental way for ordinary working people to satisfy their hunger. Soups were porridgy things made with whatever was at hand, which was often not much. The European folk story "Stone Soup" tells of villagers who try to make a soup with nothing but a stone and some water. Each person adds another ingredient to the soup -- a carrot, some herbs, some potatoes, butter, salt and pepper -- until it has become something rich and delicious for everyone to share.

This peasant soup-as-meal was a very different thing from the soups eaten by the rich, which were just one course among many, more like a snack than a meal. King Louis XIV of France was said to be crazy about soups, preferring them highly seasoned with strong meat broth. His sister-in-law, the Princess Palatine, wrote that she regularly saw the king eat four "full plates of soup," followed by a whole pheasant, a partridge, a salad, some pastry and fruit and some hard-boiled eggs.

The notion that soup should be served as a smooth and suave appetizer, rather than the main event, goes back to this aristocratic tradition of European soup eating. As the novelist Alexandre Dumas wrote in his "Grand Dictionary of Cooking," published after his death in 1873, "The name of soup is applied to every food whose destiny is to be served in a soup tureen at the beginning of a meal."

A first course of soup can be a very lovely thing, whether it's a salty cup of clam chowder or a silky-smooth dish of emerald-green watercress soup that tickles your appetite rather than sating it. In the summer, there are few nicer ways to start a meal than with a cooling shot of gazpacho or iced cucumber soup. But while the days are still so dark and short, the soups I love the most are the kind that leave you satisfied all by themselves." [1]

1. REVIEW --- Table Talk: A Bowl of Nourishment For Peasants and Kings --- Soup is a staple of cuisines around the world, whether it's made to tickle a refined appetite or serve as a meal in itself. Wilson, Bee.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 20 Jan 2024: C.3.