Restaurants began with soup
The word restaurant comes from soup. In Paris in the 1760s, a new kind of shop began selling small bowls of rich BROTH, called restaurants, from the French for something that restores you, to people who felt weak or unwell. Customers sat at their own small tables, chose from a menu and paid for what they ordered, which was new at the time. Within a few decades the shops were serving whole meals, and the name moved from the soup to the place.
Almost every kitchen still starts soups the same way, with a STOCK made by letting bones or vegetables SIMMER for hours to draw out their flavour. BOUILLON is French for broth, and CONSOMME is a stock made crystal clear: cooks stir in egg whites, which rise to the top as a floating raft and trap every cloudy speck.
Noodles in a hurry
RAMEN began as a Chinese noodle soup brought to Japan by Chinese cooks in the late 1800s, and Japan made it its own, with regional styles from rich pork-bone broth to soy sauce and miso. In 1958, after years of experimenting in a shed behind his house, a businessman called Momofuku Ando invented instant ramen: noodles fried in oil so they dried out and could be brought back to life with boiling water. In 1971 he put them in a cup. There are now museums devoted to him in Japan.
Vietnam's PHO, a clear beef broth with rice noodles, fresh herbs and lime, grew up in the north of the country in the early 1900s, and some food historians think the French beef stew pot-au-feu may have helped inspire it.
Beetroot, okra and cold tomatoes
BORSCHT, the deep red beetroot soup, is eaten across eastern Europe, and in 2022 the culture of cooking Ukrainian borscht was added to the United Nations list of cultural heritage in need of urgent protection. GUMBO, a thick stew from Louisiana, takes its name from an African word for okra, one of its main ingredients, carried to America by enslaved people.
Spain's GAZPACHO is served cold, which makes sense in the heat of an Andalusian summer. The oldest versions had no tomatoes at all, since tomatoes had not yet arrived from the Americas: they were bread, garlic, olive oil, vinegar and water pounded together. The red TOMATO version came later.
Chowder, bisque and a can of soup
CHOWDER may take its name from the French chaudière, a big cooking pot, and New England clam chowder is creamy while Manhattan's is red with tomatoes, a difference some New Englanders consider a crime. A BISQUE is a smooth, rich soup made from shellfish such as lobster or crab.
In 1897 a chemist at the Campbell's company, John Dorrance, worked out how to take the water out of soup so it could be sold in small cans and diluted at home, making it cheap to ship. In 1962 the artist Andy Warhol painted thirty-two canvases of Campbell's soup cans, one for each flavour the company sold. The CHICKEN NOODLE, the LENTIL, the ONION and the MINESTRONE in the grid, along with PUMPKIN and every VEGGIE soup, still go into a BOWL with a LADLE.