Ni, Sha, and Ussher!
I was told the other day that James Ussher, the Archbishop of Armagh (the Church of Ireland) had way too much time on his biblical hands in 1650 so he counted generations, historical accounts, and religious bits in the Old Testament to determine that the world was created on October 23, 4004 BCE which he published as Annales veteris testamenti, a prima mundi origine deducti, a very catchy title indeed. He also predicted the world would end in 1996. Specifically November 4, 1996.
If Ussher were right ~ about the creation of the universe, not the end of the world; as far as we can tell, that particular prediction of his hasn’t come true ~ it would put the creation of the universe about 14,000 years after the first Soup.
How do we know this? Because Ofer Bar-Yosef’s group found a 20,000-year-old soup pot in China, which has a history even older than 4004 BCE. Tasty millet from 7,000 BCE gives evidence of our friends in the Jiahu dynasty (賈湖) living it up in the central area of China between two rivers (Ni and Sha) in Henan Province.
Millet? What’s that? Stuff used to make beer. Yes, the first food stuffs the first dynasty made in China was beer. And how is millet beer made? By Boiling! Like Soup! Yes, Soup! Party on, Jiahu-dudes.
What did Bar-Yosef find? I said, a soup pot that had been used to boil something, possibly beer, possibly soup. Which might make this 20,000-year-old pot the first soup maker. Of course, Neanderthals were possibly boiling animal bones 40,000 years before Ussher’s date of the creation of the universe (not just the earth, mind you but the earth, the moon, the sun, the stars, and all the black holes in existence, known and unknown.) And if our cousins the Neanderthals were boiling bones and daintily sipping the broth pinky fingers aloft, could that not be the first soup? Bone Broth.
However, let it not go unnoticed that cooking food is probably 40,000 years old and in that brief span of time (in relation to the age of the universe as determined by facts, not Ussher), is it that inconceivable that some cook put water and meat together to pop up with a tasty mastodon dish to accompany a millet beer?
What is soup? Besides, possibly, water and other ingredients? Here’s a couple of obvious ones: liquid food; liquid food prepared with meat, fish, or vegetables. So, soup is neither a sandwich nor solid food. If the Neanderthals were boiling bones and drinking the broth, wouldn’t that (liquid food prepared with meat…) be the first soup? Sort of like onion soup except for the onion.
Of all the soups made by humans over the past 40,000 years none is more memorable to people still living who also own a video/dvd player or YouTube than Duck Soup, a comedy the Marx Brothers put out in 1933, which is a very long time ago. In Duck Soup, which was the Marx Brothers’ last Paramount movie before rushing off to Irving Thalberg’s MGM, Groucho plays an arms dealer who becomes the leader of a country (Freedonia) and proceeds to get it into a war with the neighboring country (Sylvania) by insulting their ambassador. The ambassador, of course, wants to take over Freedonia so he sends two spies to spy on Groucho. The spies (Chico and Harpo Marx) manage to bumble everything and one (Chico) becomes the Freedonia Minister of War. Duck Soup is considered by many to be one of the Marx Brothers’ best movies. It examines the stupidity of war, arms dealers, and petty jealousies that lead to war.
Restaurants Soup and the Revolution!
Whence cometh this word soup? Is it French? Latin? Old Norse? Chinese? (Speaking of Chinese soup…. Japanese miso soup has a long history. Many things have a history not only in Japan but other places as well. Check out this: In the 6th century soy bean-based foods were introduced into Japan from China at about the same time as Buddhism and hanji, the Chinese writing system. One soy bean-based food was something called shi, which shouldn’t be confused with either Ni or Sha, which were rivers. Up until the Muromachi era, miso was made without grinding the beans. Hard miso it must’ve been, eh? Similar, one suspects, to the natto. But then! Behold! Some priests in the 200 years of the Muromachi era discovered grinding! Yes, they could grind the soy beans and make a miso Paste. Wonder of miracles will never end? Miso paste was then slapped onto darn near everything this side of sake.)
Back to the word soup. No, restaurant. No, soup. Why? Read on and perhaps you shall see? Perhaps. The French lay claim to the word soup. There. Happy? But wait! There’s more: The French soupe comes from Vulgar Latin suppa, ~ and don’t you admit it is indeed vulgar ~ via German’s sop. What do these words mean besides soup as we know it? Well, soupe means soup; suppa means bread soaked in broth (this will be important later so please try to remember it); sop means a piece of bread that’s soaked in soup (this will be important later, too, so if you forgot what suppa means, please try to remember it from sop. As in “Sop up the remains of your stew, Julius*, you’re wasting food. Here, use this piece of bread.”
*Julius Marx, Groucho’s real name.
Boulanger
Let’s skip ahead to the 16th century (a thousand years after miso was introduced into kanji-less Japan via China.). In France, enterprising young people would sell soup out of street carts to make money. Soup was served for a couple three reasons:
it was cheap to make;
a whole bunch could be made easily and quickly;
soup was thought to be a restorative, i.e. it brought people back from exhaustion so that they could get back to work to make more money for the elite; or at least not starve to death.
So soup was cheap, easy to make, and had the power to get people up and going. Then some quick-witted young person named M. Boulanger started a store that sold only soup.
M. Boulanger (neither the composer nor the military general), signaling the end of the great aristocratic kitchens in France and the beginning of chefs making themselves commercially available for the masses, put a sign (in Latin) outside his Parisian soup restaurant in 1765, saying, Venite omnes qui stomacho laboratis, et ego restauranto vos. Or in the vernacular of America: Come all ye who labor with the stomach, and I will restore you. Thus creating today's word restaurant from restauranto (restore).
Since soup was restorative the word restaurant appeared to the French to be the perfect place to eat food outside the home. And English uses the same word as well for the same place. As do other languages in easily recognizable forms such as Japanese (レストラン ~ restoran), Italian (ristorante), Portuguese (restaurante), Afrikaans (restaurant) and Malay (restoran).
Broth, Bouillon, Consommé, & French Collaborators
What are these three? Soups of a certain kind. For example, broth is almost soup or is soup. It’s got meat or veggies and is often thickened with some kind of cereal like barley? rice? or oats. It’s mostly used as a base for other soups. Often you’ll find chicken, beef, or vegetable broth in the soup aisle of your local ma and pa’s store (if they sell food items and not hardware.)
Bouillon is, besides hard to remember how to spell, the French word for broth, so it’s apparently the same thing as broth. Mostly we see bouillon in little dice without the numbers on the sides. Or cubes, as they might be called by the so-called literate peoples of the world (like the French).
Consomme is clear. And yes, it too, like its brother bouillon, is a French word that means complete or concentrated or something of that nature. Consomme, like bouillion and broth, is oft used as a starting point for making soup. And, it can also be soup itself. Cool, no?
Vichyssoise is a thick soup made of puréed leeks, onions, potatoes, cream, and chicken stock. It is traditionally served cold & may have been invented by a Frenchman working in the US in about 1917. He combined leeks, potatoes, and milk for the first attempt at Vichyssoise. Vichyssoise was named after Vichy, France, the capital of Nazi-held collaborationist France during World War II but otherwise a resort town smack dab in the middle of France.
Milton Supman
First Generation Hungarian-American
Tony Sales and Hunt Sales are brothers of the same mother and father plus musicians. Tony plays the bass and he played with Todd Rundgren, Iggy Pop, and David Bowie so he’s no slouch in the four-string musical instrument department. He grew up in Detroit, MI and performed live on TV back when TV had live shows when he was 14 years old with his first band, Tony and the Tigers (which also included his brother Hunt on drums.)
Hunt Sales, speaking of which, plays the drums. He also was born and raised in Detroit and is also a musician who has played with the same people as his older brother. In fact, they were a combo ~ bass & drums ~ that were used by a bunch of people including session work for different people.
Now, the question is, why are we talking about two musicians from Detroit in a small book about Soup with a capital S? Well, their father was Milton Supman.
Supman was born in North Carolina to a small store owner and his wife (actually, his wife had Supman and she helped the small store owner (who may have sold soup) in his store.). Milton had two older brothers so, as the youngest, Milton spent a lot of time making up jokes, funny skits, and stories. After high school, Milt joined the navy, saw action in the South Pacific (although not in the musical by the same name), and made jokes and skits for the other sailors.
He started working in different radio stations throughout the US after he graduated from college after the end of World War II. He had, sometimes simultaneously, four shows:
a children’s show,
a dance program,
a variety show, and
a jazz program.
Sometimes on TV and sometimes on radio, mostly in the midwest around the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit triangle (all industrial cities now facing, especially Detroit, extinction). This all was happening in the early 1950s. (Tony and Hunt were born in 1951 and 1954, respectively.)
Supman’s children’s shows concentrated on silly gags, slapstick, and improvisation. His dance programs (one was the first ever in the US), had popular music and teenagers dancing. His variety shows were a more adult version of his children’s shows with slapstick, singing, silly gags, and improvisation with puns and wordplay. His jazz shows included live performances and interviews with people such as Miles Davis (six appearances), Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker… Charlie Parker!!… Stan Getz and Clifford Brown. Brown’s appearance is the only video of Brown performing. The Temptations also were frequent visitors to all of his radio and TV shows. So much so that Milton wrote liner notes for one of their albums.
In 1960 he moved his talents to Los Angeles where he stayed for four years doing basically the same types of shows but with big movie stars instead of jazz stars. In 1964 he wandered back east to start a TV show in New York City. Frequent visitors included Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis (Jamie Lee Curtis’s dad), Judy Garland (Liza Minelli’s mom), the Supremes, Sammy Davis, Jr. and, again, of course, and naturally, the Temptations.
Milton was so popular that he was often a guest host on the most popular night talk show in the universe: the Tonight Show; whenever Johnny Carson took a vacation or got sick, Milton filled in. He was a guest on the Ed Sullivan Show that fateful Sunday night the Beatles made their first US appearance. He was the act just before the Beatles. No one remembers that. Naturally.
So, basically, Milton Supman was a very popular TV and radio host of a variety of shows: children’s shows, variety, music, talk, and, in his later years interview shows on radio. He was also often on game shows in the 70s and 80s.
Why, then, are we writing and you reading about Milton Supman and his two musical kids in a small book about soup?
Well, first, his parents sold soup in their general store back in North Carolina and they had a sense of humor. This humor was first displayed in the nicknames they gave their three sons, of which, as noted above, Milton was the third. The first son, Leonard, had the unfortunate nickname of Hambone. The second son, Jack, was nicknamed Chicken Bone. Milton was honored with the nickname Soup Bone. But as an entertainer, he used the name Soupy Sales. Yeah, Soup! (He took his last name from an actor, writer, and director named Chic Sale who wrote a play and a book about a carpenter who only built outhouses. Sale’s book and play were so popular that Chic Sale became another name for outhouse which we now call the Can.)
The Can
1795. The French army was marching in all sorts of directions: against Italy in their war with Austria, in France itself against peasants, against the British in Corsica (Napoleon’s birthplace), and had recently recovered from their own revolution commonly called the French Revolution (1789, July 14). The army needed food. And they needed food they could easily move, easily store, and would last as long as needed. Chopping up a cow and hauling the meat around in the open air was not conducive to healthy soldiers, and healthy soldiers were a prerequisite for an army in order to kill lots of other healthy people. The cow meat would kill you if it had enough clostridium botulinum microorganisms. The French government wanted to avoid those microorganisms as much as they wanted to avoid Russia. Oops.
In 1795 the French army created a contest. The goal: some way to preserve food (other than the time tested and traditional salting method). By 1806, a brewer/confectioner named Nicolas Appert, won the prize (of 12,000 francs which now would be what? A gabillion dollars?) His solution: the Can. His method was to freeze, boil, vacuum-pack, dry, and pasteurize, the food (not all of them, just one for a specific food) and slap them in a can. (Not an outhouse, fortunately for us all.)
Thus, the French army could fill a wagon full of cans of food and not have to rely on the kindness of the people they had just killed. They could, if they wanted, march from Paris to Moscow and defeat the Russian empire with cans of food. Oops. Interestingly enough, the can opener was invented in 1855 which was basically a small knife; the rotating cutter-type can opener was invented in 1870 but wasn’t popular; the modern can opener was developed in 1925 ~ almost 120 years after canned food. A government enticement program, then, invented canned food while private enterprise created the can opened, albeit 120 years later.
Meanwhile, in the US, in 1897, a young chemist named John Dorrance created condensed soup. At the time he was working for a small food business started in 1869 by Abe Anderson (who made refrigerators) and John Campbell (who sold fruit.) Together they canned fruit, veggies, soup, and meat. Dorrance’s creation included the elimination of most of the water from soup and slapping it in a can. The consumer could then add the missing water to create soup! This is not so different than Cup Noodle or dried ramen products. Just add hot water, in the case of ramen.
Canned soup has a much longer shelf life than regular home-made soup so it became a very profitable item for the company named, now, Campbell’s. In fact, canned soups are the largest part of Campbell’s profit pie (which they also make). The three most popular Campbell’s soups are Tomato, Cream of Mushroom, and Chicken Noodle (鳥汁 in the Japanese). About 2.5 Billion of these cans of soup are sold in the US alone every year.
Chicken soup, by the way, is famous as a remedy for every known disease in the universe. When Manilal Gandhi (1892 ~ 1956) ~ son of Mohandas K ~ got typhoid and pneumonia at the same time, the doctor recommended chicken soup and eggs, forgetting, perhaps, that the Gandhis were practically vegans, or at least very strict vegetarians, so Manilal had to rely on modern medicine instead.
Today when people have a cold, flu, or even mild depression, it is often suggested that the patient consume some chicken soup. It is considered a comfort food the world over; it is also no coincidence that a popular self-help book is called Chicken Soup for the Soul. (Did you notice that Mohandas K. Gandhi and the Campbell’s soup company were started in the same year? Coincidence? I don’t think so.)
Death Soups
Chicken noodle soup might be a comfort food and prescribed by mothers and do-gooders the world over, but some people have had soup as their last meal or their penultimate meal. For example, our favorite fat comedian John Belushi’s last meal consisted of lentil soup. Chef Julia Child had French onion soup shortly before dying. US President Millard Fillmore and actress Marlene Dietrich also ate soup shortly before shuffling off this mortal coil but the kind is not recorded, nor did they sup together. Confederate general Robert Lee had something called beef tea, which sounds like a soup with meat in it, before dying in 1870. Allen Ginsberg, poet, had fish chowder before dying of liver cancer but grossly, bits of his leftover fish chowder were frozen and kept in a future museum. Speaking of gross, here come two more soups of questionable taste, see what I did there?
Captain James Cook, sailing on the Resolution in 1772, became sick. I’m pretty sure his doctor suggested chicken soup; unfortunately Cook’s procurement officer failed to load up the Resolution with either chickens or Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, the later having not been invented by the time the Resolution cast off. The doctor was forced to slaughter, cure, and make a soup from the meat of Captain Cook’s dog. Cook recovered but there is no mention of what became of the doctor who killed his pet.
Meanwhile, back in the US, back in the US, back in the USSR… no, just California; specifically, the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. In November 1846, the ill-fated, cold, and definitely irritated group of pioneers who were going to California from Springfield, Illinois (birthplace of Lincoln) to strike it rich struck out from Wyoming. George Donner was born in North Carolina, like Soupy Sales. After a lot of hard times in difficult travel for wagons with many children, the group became snowed in in the Sierra Nevada mountains near what is now called Donner Lake. Food was soon in short supply. Then it began to snow again. They were stuck. They could neither return nor go forward. Then food ran out. Four women attempted to find help by hiking out of the snow but came back empty-handed four days later. The Donner party was reduced to making broth out of their dead friends. Of the 89 people who set out before the snows hit, 41 died and many were made into a delicious human broth that allowed the other 48 to survive until help ~ and food ~ arrived in February 1847.
Eliza Poor Donner Houghton, survivor and youngest child of party-organizer, George Donner
Soup Talks in the Talkies
Yojimbo (1961)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Masterless samurai Toshiro Mifune plays two clans against the other in a corrupt village; stays with Gonji the sake seller, & eats straight out of his soup kettle with chopsticks.
Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl (1999)
Directed by Joan Chen
This painfully beautiful movie chronicles the story of Xiu Xiu, victim of Mao Zedong's “rustification” period, where she starts out in exile with a Tibetan horseman who kindly makes her onion soup and who then is forced to watch as she desperately and unsuccessfully uses her body with passing strangers to try to escape back to civilization.
About Schmidt (2002)
Directed by Alexander Payne
There he is, flat on his back with a crooked neck after losing a bedtime battle with a water bed: Warren R. Schmidt is being aggressively spoon-fed chicken noodle soup by future in-law Roberta Hertzel, helplessly listening to her analysis of his daughter’s sex life with her son.
301/302 (1995)
Directed by Chul-Soo Park
In this disturbing psychological drama between two damaged women living next door in a Korean high rise, bulimic Yoon Hee in Apt. 302 (Sin-Hye Hwang) disappears. The police question cooking-obsessed Song-Hee (Eun-jin Bang) in Apt. 301, who consults her cooking diary to verify that her last meal with Yoon Hee was Soup with Mushroom Sauce. Well, not exactly. This is a great movie to see if you're on a diet. You may never want to eat again.
Age of Innocence (1993)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Turtle Soup at ALL the fine dinner parties, usually the second of 12 to 14 courses. Early in the movie, a crate of small turtles is shown making its way to a kitchen.
Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
Directed by Frank Capra
A comedy about two old ladies whose hobby is killing lonely old men; usually by poisoning their food.
Abby: How's Missus Brophy?
Brophy: Oh she's better, thank you, but, uh, a little weak still.
Abby: Oh, well I'll go and get a little beef broth for you to take to her.
Brophy: Oh, Miss Abby, please don't bother. You've done so much already.
Abby: Oh, stuff and nonsense. I won't be a minute.
Babette's Feast (1987)
Directed by Gabriel Axel
Turtle soup kicks off the greatest meal these simple Jutlanders ever dreamed of eating. The movie opens with Martina and Filippa, Danish puritan sisters, taking the poor and sick villagers bowls of good soup. Only later do we find out why that soup is so good: it's been prepared by one of the great chefs of the world, transplanted to Jutland after a brutal French uprising in 1871.
La Bandera (1935)
Directed by Julian Duvivier
Poor starving fugitive Jean Gabin gets his face dunked into his Spanish soup two times before he finally joins the French Foreign Legion and gets a life.
Batman Returns (1992)
Directed by Tim Burton
Alfred serves vichyssoise to Batman who is at work in front of his computer and immediately complains that the soup is cold.
The Bicycle Thief (1949)
Directed by Vittorio DeSica
In their desperate sojourn to recover a bicycle, Antonio and son Bruno stumble into a church-run soup kitchen where the poor and homeless customers are literally locked into a chapel to ensure that they hear Mass before being fed.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
Directed by Ang Lee
Jen Yu ordered Shark Fin Soup at the inn right before she destroys the place and everyone in it.
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988),
Directed by Pedro Almodovar
Iván leaves Pepa and she is desolate. She makes a batch of gazpacho, then drops in a full bottle of barbiturates. While it cools, people arrive: a friend who abetted Shiite terrorists; young lovers; Iván’s new lover and wife; the police. One by one, they help themselves to the soup and instantly fall into the long sleep.
The Wedding Banquet (1993),
Directed by Ang Lee
Wai-Tung Gao (Winston Chao) is in New York City managing real estate for his family back in Taiwan and is in a longterm relationship with Andrew. But the pressure from his family to marry a woman is ferocious. Unwilling to confess he is gay, he arranges a marriage of convenience with one of his tenants, Wei-Wei (May Chin). Mom and Dad arrive for the wedding and a 2-week stay. Wai-Tung and Wei-Wei's modest plans almost immediately go stratospheric.
Mrs. Gao: Sister Mao, please get the Lotus soup.
Wai-Tung and Wei-Wei bow three times to the parents and are handed an envelope.
W & W: Thank you, Ma.
Mrs. Gao We're turning Wai-Tung over to you.
Mr. Gao And you, Wai-Tung, must care well for Wei-Wei.
Wai-Tung I will
Mr. Gao Here's a soup for a quick first son.
Wai-Tung: Wei-Wei, kneel for the soup.
Mrs. Gao Have some lotus soup, a son will come quickly.
Wei-Wei Come on, Wai-Tung, kneel down and have some soup with me.
Wai-Tung Having a son is a female thing.
Mrs. Gao She can't five birth without your help, right?
Sleepless in Seattle (1993)
Directed by Nora Ephron.
One of the characters in Sleepless in Seattle wants to write an article about a guy who makes great soup but is very mean. (Read on for more delicious details.)
Tortilla Soup (2001)
Directed by Maria Ripoll
This is a remake of Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman, (see the next entry). Hispanic chef Martin makes squash blossom soup. His daughter Carmen criticizes it for not including the seeds of the serrano peppers. Youngest daughter Maribel precipitates disaster when she tries to teach her Brazilian boyfriend soup manners. But it's the tortilla soup scene that is the heart of the movie, when Martin begins to accept his daughters' love and free will. Daughter Letitia brings home the man she's just eloped with:
Orlando: I love toppings. I've always loved toppings. Sometimes I go to restaurants and I just ask for toppings. You know, I say, the more toppings the merrier. I, ... that's what I say.
Carmen: You like Tortilla Soup?
Orlando: Yes, yes, of course. Yes, my mother used to make it for us all the time. [pause while he tastes] She never made it like this. This is, is the best Tortilla Soup I've ever had.
Eat Drink Man Woman (1995)
Directed by Ang Lee
Master Chef Chu, alone and repressed, caring for three troubled daughters and having completely lost his sense of taste, paces out his days with little joy. In the final scene his critical taste for soup shows he has recovered his zest for life:
Jia-Chien: What's wrong?
Chu: Nothing, it's delicious. Yet…
Jia-Chien: What?
Chu: Too much ginger. Too much, and its effect is ruined.
Jia-Chien: I disagree. It's not too much. This is Mother's recipe ... and you complained way back then. You're too timid with ginger.
Chu: I'm certainly not.
Jia-Chien: Don't boss me around.
Chu: I'm not. It was a minor criticism about a slight taste of too much ginger...a taste ...“
Jia-Chien: Yes? A taste...?
Chu: Jia-Chien, your soup…
Jia-Chien: What about my soup?
Chu :Your soup, Jia-Chien. I taste it. I can taste it.
Jia-Chien: You can taste?
Chu: I taste it. Some more, please. Daughter.
Jia-Chien: Father.
Butterfly Tongues (2000)
Directed by José Luis Cuerda
In this memoir of Spain on the brink of civil war, soup is a symbol of the family: first, boiling over on the stove when Moncho argues with his mother over the existence of God and the devil; second, served from a tureen as a sacrament of family life — the traditional Galician soup with pork and lots of cabbage; and third, offered to Don Gregorio as a restorative after he wades into a river with Moncho to save him from a dangerous asthma attack.
Tortilla Flat (1942)
Directed by Victor Fleming
Pilon, trying to worm hidden money out of Pirate, tells him of a cousin whose hidden money was stolen, leaving him a broken man. Pilon says “Maybe you know my cousin. He is the little one who crawls around on the wharf begging for fish heads to make soup out of.”
Cold Dog Soup (1990)
Directed by Alan Metter
Michael and taxi-driving Jack Cloud try to get rid of Michael's date's dead dog so Michael can get back to her. When they hopefully stop at a Chinese restaurant, Madame Chang says that Jasper has been dead too long to make "cold dog soup" even if you add watercress, white pepper, and a few scallions. She adds, "I can't serve stiff dog. It's not fair to my customers.“
Spartacus (1960)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Spartacus falls in love with Varinia over soup she’s giving the gladiators. When she is sold off, Spartacus drowns Marcellus in a very large kettle of bean soup. And the revolt is on!
Pride and Prejudice (1940)
Directed by Robert Z. Leonard
Mary: Mama, do you suppose they'll have turtle soup for dinner?
Mrs. Bennett: No dear, you can't expect turtle soup until the engagement is actually announced.
Then, when Mrs. Bennett is in hysterics over Lydia's elopement
Mr. Wickham: Here's some delicious chicken broth, Mama. Now you must eat it while it's hot.
Mrs. Bennett: No no, thank you Liddy, I could not. You don't know what I'm feeling ... Did you say it was chicken broth? Well, peut être, if I make a great effort.“
And now, the two greatest movies about soup in the history of movies about soup. First, from long ago:
Tom Jones (1963)
Directed by Tony Richardson
There is a very famous, sex-drenched eating scene between Tom and, (all unknowingly) possibly his mother, Mrs. Waters. It begins naturally enough with big steaming pewter bowls of soup. There is much licking of lips and sucking of food bits and, of course, Mrs. Waters leans well over the table and breasts tumble out of her bodice. Lots of come-hither looks. Tom, nearly overcome, involuntarily rips a claw off the lobster he has in his hand and sucks on it.
Tampopo (1986)
Directed by Juzo Itami
Newly widowed Tampopo will stop at nothing to achieve the perfect noodle for the perfect ramen soup. Enter truck driver Goro and his team of advisers who opine, “It's the soup that animates the noodles.” Tampopo works hard while Goro doles out advice. To get just the right recipe for her soup, they're not above bribery or rifling through a successful ramen shop’s garbage to filch its secrets. The whole movie deals with food in Japan from the board room to a couple who swap a raw egg instead of kissing.
John Steinbeck’s Pozole
Pozole which means hominy; is a traditional soup or stew from Mexico that originated long before Columbus ‘discovered’ the New Continent. Pozole once was religious in nature. Pozole was mentioned in Fray Bernardino de Sahagún’s “General History of the Things of New Spain” circa 1500. It is made from nixtamalized cacahuazintle maize (like corn), with meat, usually pork, chicken, turkey, pork rinds, chili peppers, and other seasonings and garnish such as cabbage, salsa and limes and lemons. The Spaniards changed the ingredients, of course, but the staple maize remained.
Steinbeck’s recipe: a can of chili and a can of hominy
And a Chicken in Every Pot
From whence comes this proverb, saying, oft quoted phrase? Harken back to 1589, four hundred years before a certain American going by the name Stenson arrived on the shores of the island nation of Japan. In 1589, it had been 17 years since Henry IV of France married Margaret of Valois, daughter of Henry II and Catherine de Medici, she of the de Medici banking, politically powerful, royal house of Firenze in what is now Italy. Back then religion was important. People were actually killing and being killed for and because of their religion. Not like the enlightened present, eh?
The same week that Margaret and Henry IV married, France endured the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in which thousands of Protestants (Henry IV was one) were slaughtered by Catholics (Margaret and the de Medici were definitely Catholic; the de Medici fathered not one but four popes.)
In order to prove his devotion to his religious wife ~ and to save his own chicken-ass ~ Henry IV agreed to become Catholic if she would protect him. She did. Soon after, Henry IV denounced Catholicism and joined a Protestant army.
His marriage to Margaret (daughter, remember of Catherine de Medici) was childless. Childlessness is not a good thing for a queen. (To which Henry VIII’s multitude of wives can bear witness. Also Henry VIII is not related to Henry IV. VIII was English; IV was French.) The Catholic church annulled their marriage in 1599, fortunately, as Henry married his second wife, Marie de Medici, in 1600. Yes, another de Medici and a powerful one at that. She spent many years running France for her son, Louis XIII after the death of Henry IV, who was assassinated by a Catholic fanatic. How did a Catholic fanatic get so close to a Protestant king? Simple, there was a lot of traffic in Paris that day in 1610 because Marie was getting crowned queen of France and Henry’s carriage was caught up in the traffic. Ironic, no?
At Henry’s own coronation, which meant nothing because no one would allow him to rule France, in 1589 he said, Je veux que le dimanche chaque paysan ait sa poul au pot which in the English language is usually translated as I wish that every peasant may have a chicken in his pot on Sundays.
Eventually he militarily took over France (with the help of another Protestant royal leader named Elizabeth of England, daughter of Henry VIII and the defeater of the Spanish Armada in 1588 a scant one year before Henry’s coronation; coincidence?) and was in both deed and law the real King of France. So we have both chicken and chicken soup related to the French royal house.
In the US of America, a candidate for the office of the presidency declared that if he were to win there would be A Chicken in Every Pot and a Car in Every Garage! And he won. Seven months later Herbert Hoover was in charge of rescuing the US from the biggest depression in its history, the Crash of ‘29 (not to be matched until the world-wide Crash of ’08.) Following the Crash, American voters eschewed Hoover’s pie in the sky soup of prosperity and voted in Franklin Roosevelt. Not once, but four times. But at least Hoover got a vacuum cleaner and a dam named after him. Although the dam, when finished in 1935, was ‘opened’ by Roosevelt, it never carried Roosevelt’s name: it was first called Boulder Dam and then Hoover Dam. Hoover is also the only US President so far who could speak Chinese, country of origin for ramen, and maybe miso (味噌)
Raamen and Miso: Soups of Another
Where did this health-oriented food called miso come from and what is it used for is a question on the lips of almost everyone somewhere in the world with little else to do? Like James Ussher? Maybe. But if you think back a few pages, you might find a quick oversling of miso.
However, first came something called hishio. Hishio, like the name might imply to those who have a causal connection to Japanese, is a salty seasoning made from, probably, rice? or other grain. 味噌 is miso in Japanese and Wèizēng in Chinese.
Jomon-era miso was made during, wait for it, the Jomon era of Japanese history which stretched from about 14,000 BCE until just before CE. Like many misos, it was made from fish or soy beans. More recent miso originated in China about just before CE (300 BCE) and introduced to Japan and Korea at about the same time as the Buddhism and the kanji. (漢字 or, in Chinese, 汉字)
Temaemiso means miso made at home. Homemade miso, it is. There are a billion varieties of miso in Japan because anyone can make it, because it is relatively easy to make? Well, many things are relatively easy to make. Doesn’t mean everyone jumps on the DIY miso bandwagon. Like most things during the Japanese Warring States era (1467-1568 CE), miso became a staple for the militaries running around the archipelago so miso makers (mostly the rich and powerful) made money.
During the relatively peaceful Edo era (1603-1867), miso became a thing for each region to specialize in. And now, miso is added to soup as part of a typical Japanese breakfastlunchordinner. There is even Miso Ramen!
Ramen!
Sometimes written, by me at least, as raamen because in Japanese ramen is ラーメン with a long ー after the ら(ra). The origin of ramen is debatable but why? Linguistic evidence points its accusative finger once more at China. In Japan before the 1950s ramen was called Chuuka Soba or 中華そば which means Chinese noodles. Also linguistically speaking ramen is very similar to lamian 拉面 which is the Chinese pronunciation of ramen.
In any case, after World War II many returning veterans had a hankering for noodles in a broth topped with pork, veggies, eggs, or other tasty bits. These noodle & toppings were popular in China, especially Shanghai. At the same time, some Chinese living in Japan, especially Yokohama, started pulling carts that sold ramen and gyoza.
In fact, also at about the same time, Wu Baifu, a Taiwanese gentlemen, started to develop a ramen that could be stored for a long period of time and, when desired, hot water could be added to produce a small cup of ramen. Similarly to Dorrance at Campbell’s Soup who condensed soup to a glutinous mass that needed water to make soup. (Cast your mind back to Campbell’s soup, if you so desire.)
Eventually, Baifu became a naturalized Japanese citizen and changed his name to Momofuku Ando and started Nissin Foods, one of the largest makers of instant ramen in Japan. In the US, students often call Ando’s instant ramen Top Ramen because Ando marketed it under the name Top Ramen.
Ando made two kinds of ramen, by the way. One where you have a cup and add water thereby producing a cup of noodles called Cup Noodle; the other one is just the noodles in a square package with some seasonings. With the square one, people have to have a sauce pan in which to boil some water and a bowl to eat it from. The square one is Top Ramen; the cup one is, of course, Cup Noodle.
Ramen comes in many flavors including miso, a salty flavor, pork, and soy sauce. Toppings can be seaweed, egg, or pork. What is not popular are stones in your ramen. Really? Stone soup?
Stone Soup
Here is a folk tale about how to make stone soup. It first appeared in the folk lore in 1720.
‘Give me a piece of paper’ said the traveler ‘and I’ll write it down for you,’ which he did as follows:—A receipt to-make Stone Soup. ‘ Take a large stone, put it into a sufficient quantity of boiling water; properly season it with pepper and salt; add three or four pounds of good beef, a handful of pot-herbs, some onions, a cabbage, and three or four carrots. When the soup is made the stone may be thrown away.’
The Stone Soup story is evidently and obviously? about how a fun-loving charismatic person can get people to help him or her when their first instinct is not to. Folklorists, who examine folk tales with too much scrutiny, place the Stone Soup story within the clever man category of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folklore classification system. Stone Soup is an Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 1548 folktale.
If you can imagine classifying stories based on content & other parameters, perhaps you can imagine the Aarne–Thompson-Uther system. It catalogues some 2500 basic plots of European and Near Eastern tales.
Where does the original Stone Soup story come from?
It might very well come from the imagination of one Madame de Noyer who was born in 1663, a very exciting year to be born. She was a hard-working, hard-partying writer known world-wide, meaning, probably, at least in Europe & the colonies. She was, like Henry IV, a Protestant until threatened with death by Catholics at which point she switched to Catholicism until the threat abated and she switched back. Much like Henry IV.
The Stone Soup story does not appear in any of the major eighteenth- or nineteenth-century collections of folk tales. It wasn’t published by Charles Perrault* or the Grimm brothers. De Noyer claimed the story was told to her by a peasant but we will never know. If a strong oral tradition for the Stone Soup story existed in the 18th and 19th centuries it is probable that it would be at least written about in other publications and stories. But it is not. It, therefore, could have sprung from De Noyer’s fertile brain sans truth as she was a journalist, a woman of letters, and a dynamic, charismatic person. She burned the candle at both ends, as we say in the language of Shakespeare.
de Noyer’s version of the Stone Soup story, Soupe au Caillou, was published in 1720, one year after she died. Her fame was so great that in French her version of the story is the most common version through the end of the nineteenth-century.
She begins, as so many great storytellers do, with an element of mystery:
On me contoit l’autre jour que …
I was told the other day that . . .
de Noyer’s version is set in Normandy:
Two Jesuits come to a farmhouse but only the children are home. The Jesuits, who are hungry, convince the children that they are not begging for food, but in fact they are self-sufficient as they have a stone that makes soup. They tell the children that all they actually need is fire, a pot, and some water and that their stone will do the rest. They remark that this is “curieux” and from that point the game is on. A fire is got ready, a pot put over, water is added, a stone is dropped in, and then water is hot, this and that is asked for until, finally, a truly fabulous soup has been made.
It always has a happy ending. Everyone always seems to have a good time making the soup, and the soup itself is always loved. In many versions the scammer is asked for the recipe. In many versions all the villagers are brought into the story. Of course, nobody thinks that a stone can make soup. Nobody is tricked into feeding the stranger. The beggar is personable and is understood to be saying, “I’ll provide you some great entertainment in exchange for a meal.”
*Charles Perrault
France. The originator of the words soup (maybe), restaurant, and a chicken in every pot. Also home of a variety of soups with hard to spell names like vichyssoise, bouillion, consommé, and bouillabaisse.
Also-also that part of the universe into which Charles Perrault was born way back around when James Ussher, the Archbishop of Armagh, was working his academic way through the Bible trying to figure out how old the earth was because knowing the age of the earth was Paramount! to his religion.
Or not, but in any case, while Ussher was calculating generations, Perrault was 22 years old and finishing up his own academic pursuits: that of getting a law degree and working in the government of Louis XIV (the Sun King), the Grandson of Henry IV (the one who married to deMedici women? Remember back to A Chicken in Every Pot? That guy’s grandson.).
But don’t confuse Louis XIV with Louis XVI, who was XIV’s great-great-grandson and Henry IV’s great-great-great-grandson. Or thereabouts. XVI died during the French Revolution (1789). Perrault died many years earlier, but while alive Perrault worked directly for the Sun King’s finance minister, Jean Baptiste Colbert.
Perrault was instrumental in getting bits of the Louvre Museum built (designed by his brother Claude), then, when a new fangled musical form evolved and a composer named Philippe Quinault wrote what was then called opera, Perrault felt called upon to defend it against traditionalists who complained opera had destroyed classical musical theatre.
Perrault was elected to a myriad of French academie that the French are so fond of being elected to like the French Academy and the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. When Perrault was 41 years old (1669, for those counting) he suggested, in French!, that Louis XIV build 39 fountains at Versailles to represent the 39 fables Aesop put together. Louis did as bidden. Then he lost his job. Not Louis, Charles. Charles lost his job. He was past retirement age now, anyway. In fact, he was 67, a good time to relax, have a few gallons of French wine, and watch the sun set on your life. But he didn’t; not our Charles.
Instead he began to write what Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d'Aulnoy called fairy tales. He wrote a bunch of them. And he put them in a book which he called Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals (in French, of course: Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé) and subtitled: Tales of Mother Goose. (LeFrance: Les Contes de ma Mère l’Oye).
He wrote Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots — which many people assume is Puss ‘N Boots, meaning there are two characters: Puss AND Boots when in fact there is only one character: a cat wearing boots which is painfully clear when the Italian title is cited: Il Gatto con Gli Stivali or The Cat with Boots, or the French: LeMaitre Chat, ou Le Chat Botte or Master Cat or The Booted Cat. English readers can be so weird. — Bluebeard, Diamonds and Toads, and a bucket-load of others. One story he didn’t write was the Soup Nazi.
Sleepless ‘n Seinfeld
Some people think the soup nazi was Larry Thomas. More intelligent people know it is Al Yeganeh and that Thomas is an actor. Some people think the soup nazi first appeared on the Seinfeld TV comedy show popular through most of the 90s ~ 1989 to 1998 ~ when Spike Feresten pitched the idea to Larry David & Jerry Seinfeld (producers of said TV show).
More intelligent people know that the soup nazi, not named as such, in fact, never named, first showed up on celluloid in Sleepless in Seattle (1993), written and directed by Nora Ephron, as you have seen. One of the characters in Sleepless in Seattle wants to write an article about a guy who makes great soup but is very mean.
What is the soup nazi? Essentially Ali Yeganeh who was born and raised in Iran, opened a soup restaurant (Did he get the idea from the Frenchman Boulanger who opened the first restaurant that served only soup in 1765?) in New York City called The Soup Kitchen International, which wasn’t so unusual, but Yeganeh insisted that customers follow the rules of his store, which, rumor has it, includes how to wait in line, how to order, and how to pay.
Ali is also famous for yelling profanities at Seinfeld for having ruined his business, which, obviously it didn’t. Ali kicked Seinfeld out of his restaurant after Seinfeld showed the Soup Nazi episode.
The End
Is the original soup man ~ or, more likely, woman as females have traditionally been the cooks of hunters & gatherers ~ an Iranian (like Ali who was born in the fertile crescent, the cradle of agriculture, farming, and writing (for the western world, at least)) or another Neanderthal 40,000 years before James Ussher declared the age of the earth was 6,000 years? Since almost all civilizations have at least one type of soup which is, after all, liquid food and relatively easy to make, and easy to make a large quantity, then soup could be considered a restorative for all of humankind.