Soup (pronounced soop)
(1) A liquid (or semi-liquid) food made by
boiling or simmering meat, fish, or vegetables with various added ingredients.
(2) As pea-soup or pea-souper, slang for a thick
fog.
(3) As soup-up, slang for increasing the power of
an internal combustion engines (archaic).
(4) Slang for the explosive nitroglycerine.
(5) Slang for photographic developing solution.
(6) As primordial soup, slang for the liquid or
gelatinous substrate on or near the surface of the early Earth, especially the
mixture of organic compounds from which emerged the earliest form(s) of life.
(7) In horse racing, slang for the illicit drugs
used to make horses run faster (mostly US).
1645–1655: From the Middle English soupe & sowpe from the French soupe (soup, broth) and the Old French souppe & sope, both from the Late Latin suppa (bread soaked in broth) of Germanic origin; The Middle High German suppe and the Old Norse soppa were both from the Proto-Germanic sup & supô and related also to the Middle Dutch sope (broth) and the later sop and supper. Root was the primitive Indo-European sub-, from seue- (to take liquid). The sense of “souping up" to describe the various methods to increase the horsepower of an internal combustion engine dates from 1921 and is either (and more likely) (1) a borrowing of the term from horse racing where it had been used since 1911 in slang sense of "narcotic injected into horses to make them run faster" or (2) the influence of the introduction of the (etymologically unrelated) supercharged Mercedes 6/25/40 & 10/40/65 hp cars. The soup-kitchen, (public establishment supported by voluntary contributions, for preparing and serving soup to the poor at no cost) is attested from 1839 and in Ireland, a souper, noted first in 1854, was a "Protestant clergyman seeking to make converts by dispensing soup in charity".
The modern concept of abiogenesis, the idea of a “primordial
soup” being the liquid in which life on Earth began was first mentioned by the British
scientist JBS Haldane (1892–1964) in an essay called “The origin of life”, published
in The Rationalist Annual (1929). It described the early ocean as a "vast
chemical laboratory", a mix of inorganic compounds in which organic
compounds could form when, under the influence of sunlight and the elements in
the atmosphere, things in some sense alive came into being. Simple at first, as the first molecules
reacted together, more complex compounds and, ultimately, cellular life forms
emerged. Of interest in the age of pandemic
is life on Earth appears to have become possible because of the prior existence
of viruses. What began as essentially
the self-replication of nucleic acids, later called biopoiesis or biopoesis, is
the beginning of viruses as the entities which existed between the prebiotic
soup and the first cells. Haldane
suggested prebiotic life would been in the form of viruses for millions of
years before, for reasons unknown and probably by chance, the circumstances
existed for a number of elementary units to combine, creating the first
cell. At the time, the scientific establishment
was sceptical to the point of derision but in the decades after publication,
the theories of Haldane and Soviet biochemist Alexander Oparin (1894–1980) (who
published a similar theory in Russian in 1924 and in English in 1936) were
increasingly supported by evidence from experiments and is now the scientific
orthodoxy.
Bat Soup, an acquired taste
Ingredients
1 large bat
2 medium hot peppers
1 chopped white onion
5 tablespoons light soy sauce
2 teaspoons lemon juice
1 pinch salt
2 cans unsweetened coconut milk
Instructions (hot sauce)
(1) In a sauce bowl, mix 2 teaspoons lemon juice
and 5 tablespoons soy sauce with chopped onion.
(2) Add chopped hot pepper according to taste.
Instructions
(1) In a large pot, boil the whole bat in water
until the skin is tender enough to tear through; for a typically-sized large
bat, this will take around two hours.
(2) Remove water. Add coconut milk to cooked bat with a pinch of
salt to taste.
Cook for a further ten minutes. Serve with hot sauce and rice.
Richard Nixon, soup and détente
Richard
Nixon (1913-1994; US president 1969-1974, centre) became famous for some things
and infamous for others but one footnote in the history of his administration
was that he banned soup. In 1969, Nixon
hosted a state dinner for Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000; prime minister of Canada
1968-1979 & 1980-1984) and the next day complained to HR Haldeman
(1926–1993; White House chief of staff 1969-1973) that the formal dinners “take forever”,
suggesting “Why
don’t we just leave out the soup course?”, adding “Men don’t really
like soup.” (other than the waitresses, state dinners were then
substantially a male preserve). Haldeman
knew his socially awkward boss well and had his suspicions so he called the president's
valet and asked, “Was there anything wrong with the president’s suit after that dinner
last night?” “Why yes…”,
the valet responded, “…he spilled soup down the vest.” Not until Gerald Ford (1913–2006; US president
1974-1977) assumed the presidency was soup restored to the White House menus to
the relief of the chefs who couldn’t believe a dinner was really a dinner
without a soup course.
A chopstick neophyte in Beijing: Zhou Enlai (1898–1976; premier of the People's Republic of China (PRC) 1949-1976, left), Richard Nixon (centre) and Zhang Chunqiao (1917–2005, right) at the welcome banquet for President Nixon's visit to the PRC, Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 26 February 1972.
The event
was not a “state visit” because at the time no formal diplomatic
relations existed between the two nations (the US still recognized the Taiwan-based
RoC (Republic of China (which Beijing regards still as a “renegade province”)) as the legitimate government of China). For
that reason, the trip was described as an “official visit”, a term not part of diplomatic
protocol. There are in history a few of
these fine distinctions: technically, diplomatic relations were never re-established
between Berlin and Paris after the fall of the Third Republic in 1940,
ambassadors were never accredited so Otto Abetz (1903-1958), who fulfilled the
role between 1940-1944 should be referred to as “de facto” German ambassador (as
the letters patent made clear, he acted with full ambassadorial authority). In July 1949, a French court handed Abetz a
twenty-year sentence for crimes against humanity; released in 1954, he died in
1958 in a traffic accident on the Cologne-Ruhr autobahn and there are
conspiracy theorists who suspect the death was “an assassination”. The de facto
ambassador was the great uncle of Eric Abetz (b 1958; Liberal Party senator for
Tasmania, Australia 1994-2022, member of the Tasmanian House of assembly since
2024).
Both the US
and the PRC had their own reasons for wishing to emerge from the “diplomatic deep-freeze”
(Moscow something of a pivot) and it was this event which was instrumental in
beginning the process of integrating the PRC into the international
system. The “official visit” also
introduced into English the idiomatic phrase “Nixon in China” (there are
variations) which describes the ability of a politician with an impeccable
reputation of upholding particular political values to perform an action in
seeming defiance of them without jeopardizing his support or credibility. For his whole political career Nixon had been
a virulent anti-communist and was thus able to make the tentative approach to
the PRC (and later détente with the Soviet Union) in a way which would not have
been possible for someone without the same history. In the same way the Democratic Party’s Bill
Clinton (b 1946; US president 1993-2001) was able during the 1990s to embark on
social welfare “reform” in a way no
Republican administration could have achieved.
Following the visit, there was also a culinary ripple in the US. Since the nineteenth century, Chinese restaurants had been a fixture in many US cities but the dishes they served were often very different from those familiar in China and some genuinely were local creations; fortune cookies began in San Francisco courtesy of a paperback edition of “Chinese Proverbs” and all the evidence suggests egg rolls were invented in New York. The news media’s coverage of the visit attracted great interest and stimulated interest in “authentic” Chinese food and the details of what was on the menus was published. Noting the banquet on the first night featured shark’s fin soup, steamed chicken with coconut and almond junket (a type of pudding), one enterprising chap was within 24 hours offering in his Manhattan Chinese restaurant recreation of each dish, a menu which remained popular for some months after the president’s return. Mr Nixon’s favorite meal during the visit was later revealed to be Peking duck.
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