Soup

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".

Lindsay Lohan making soup, London, 2014.

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.

In January 2020, even before COVID-19 had been declared a pandemic, a video was tweeted which, appropriately, went viral.  By then, it appeared SARS-Covid-2 was a mutated bat virus so a video of a young lady eating bat soup, circulating with a caption suggesting (1) it had been filmed in Wuhan in December and that (2) she was patient zero in what was then an epidemic aroused interest in the vector of transmission, if not the culinary possibilities of cooked bats.  The video was soon revealed to be fake news, dating from 2016 and shot not in Wuhan but Palau.

Bat Soup, an acquired taste

Bat soup is made by throwing a washed bat (fur included) into a pot of boiling water for two hours.  Once done, the bat is taken out of the water and cooked with ginger and coconut milk, other spices and vegetables added according to taste.  To get at the meat, some prefer to remove the fur by skinning the bat but the authentic technique is to suck out the flesh, discarding the fur.

Preparation time: 15 minutes

Cooking Time: 2 hours, 20 minutes

Serves: 4 people

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.