Soup is a primarily liquid food, generally served warm or hotthough it is sometimes served chilledmade by cooking or otherwise combining meat or vegetables with stock, milk, or water. According to The Oxford Companion to Food, soup is the main generic term for liquid savoury dishes; others include broth, bisque, consommé, potage and many more.
The consistency of soups varies from thin to thick: some soups are light and delicate; others are so substantial that they verge on being stews. Soups may be savoury or sweet.
Soups have been made since prehistoric times and have evolved over the centuries. The first soups were made from grains and herbs; later, legumes, other vegetables, meat, or fish were added. Originally, sops referred to pieces of bread covered with savoury liquid; gradually the term soup was transferred to the liquid itself. Soups are common to the cuisines of all continents and have been served at banquets as well as in peasant homes. Soups have been the primary source of nourishment for poor people in many places; in times of hardship soup kitchens have provided sustenance for the hungry.
Name The term soup, or words like it, can be found in many languages. Similar terms include the Italian , the German , the Danish , the Russian (pronounced "soup"), the Spanish and Portuguese and the Polish . According to The Oxford Companion to Food, "soup" is "the most general of the terms which apply to liquid savoury dishes"; other terms embraced by soup include broth, bisque, bouillon, consommé, potage, and many more.Davidson and Jaine, p. 756
According to the lexicographer John Ayto, "the etymological idea underlying the word soup is that of 'soaking'". In his 2012 The Diner's Dictionary Ayto writes that the word dates back to an unrecorded post-classical Latin verb "to soak", which was derived from the prehistoric Germanic root "sup–", which also produced the English "sup" and "supper". The term passed into Old French as , meaning a piece of bread soaked in liquid" and, by extension, "broth poured on to bread".Ayto, p. 344 The earliest recorded use in English of "sop" in the first sense dates from 1340. The ancient conjunction of bread and soup still exists not only in the croutons often served with soup, and the slice of baguette and Gruyère floating on traditional French onion soup, but also in bread-based soups including the German (black bread soup), the Russian and the Italian (tomato pulp).Clarkson, pp. 90–91 The records the term "" in French use from the twelfth century but adds that it is probably earlier."soupe", . Retrieved 14 June 2025 The Oxford English Dictionary records the use of the word in English in the fourteenth century: "Soppen nim wyn & sucre & make me an stronge soupe". The first known cookery book in English, The Forme of Cury, , refers to several "broths", but not to soups.Clarkson, pp. 26–27
The Oxford Companion to Food (OCF) comments that soups can "stray, over what is necessarily an imprecisely demarcated frontier", into the realm of stews. The Companion adds that this tendency is noticeable among fish soups such as bouillabaisse. The Hungarian goulash is regarded by many as a stew but by others, particularly in Hungary, as a soup ().Bickel, p. 426; and Grigson, p. 308 The food writer Harold McGee contrasts soups with sauces in On Food and Cooking, commenting that they can be so similar that soups may only be distinguished as less intensely flavoured, permitting them to be "eaten as a food in themselves, not an accent."McGee, p. 581
History Prehistory Before the invention of boiling in water, cooking was limited to simple heating and roasting.Speth, John. "When Did Humans Learn to Boil?", Paleoanthropology, 5 September 2014, pp. 54–55 The making of soup or something akin has been dated by some writers back to the Upper Palaeolithic (between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago). Some archaeologists conjecture that early humans employed hides and watertight baskets to boil liquids. According to a study by the academic Garritt C. Van Dyk, the first soup may have been made by Neanderthals, boiling animal bones and drinking the broth.Van Dyk, Garritt. "Good soup is one of the prime ingredients of good living: a (condensed) history of soup, from cave to can", The Conversation, 4 June 2023 Archaeological evidence for bone broths has been found in sites from Egypt to China.
Ancient times and later In 1988 the food writer M. F. K. Fisher commented, "It is impossible to think of any good meal, no matter how plain or elegant, without soup or bread in it. It is almost as hard to find any recorded menu, ancient or modern, without one or both".Fisher, p. 34 Methods of making soup evolved from one culture to another. The first soups were made from grains and herbs; later, peas, beans, other vegetables, pasta, meat or fish were added.Rumble, p. 3 In her 2010 work Soup: A Global History, Janet Clarkson writes that the ancient Romans had a great variety of soups. (On the Subject of Cooking), a collection of Roman recipes compiled in the fourth or fifth century from earlier manuscripts gives details of numerous ingredients, mostly vegetable.Clarkson, p. 26
In European and Arab cuisines soups continued to feature after the fall of the Roman Empire. Clarkson writes that the earliest known German cookery book, the (Book of Good Food) published in about 1345, includes recipes for many soups, including one made with beer and caraway seeds, another with leeks, almond milk and rice meal, others with carrots and almond milk or goose cooked in broth with garlic and saffron. The early fifteenth-century French book (From the Kitchen) has many recipes for potages and "sops" including several regional variants.Clarkson, p. 27
During the seventeenth century the soup itself, rather than the "sops" it contained, became seen as the most important element of the dish.Tannahill, p. 237 One of the most famous cookery books of its time was Robert May's The Accomplisht Cook (1660). Clarkson comments that about a fifth of May's recipes are for soups of one kind or another.Clarkson, p. 29
The Huangdi Neijing, a Chinese medicinal text, describes the preparation of soups and clear liquids by steaming rice, and recommends soups as medicine.
In the eighteenth century, meals at grand European tables were still served in the style that had persisted since the Middle Ages, with successive courses of three or four dishes placed on the table simultaneously and then replaced by three or more contrasting dishes.Clarkson, p. 30 Soup was typically part of the first course. Exceptionally, at particularly grand dinners, a first course might consist of four different soups, succeeded by four dishes of fish and then four of meat. In the early nineteenth century a new style of dining became fashionable in Europe and elsewhere: Russian-style service: dishes were served one at a time, usually beginning with soup.
Soup for the poor
In the OCF Alan Davidson writes that although soup is now typically served as the first of several courses in western menus, in many places around the world substantial soups have historically been an entire meal for poorer people, particularly in rural areas. Many Russian peasants subsisted on rye bread and soup made from pickled cabbage.Tannahill, p. 251
Charitable soup-kitchens preparing soup and supplying it to the needy, either free or at a very low charge, were known in the Middle East in the sixteenth century.Abu-Manneh, Butrus. "Singer: Constructing Ottoman Beneficence: An Imperial Soup Kitchen in Jerusalem", Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2, 2005, p. 123 From the late eighteenth century, soup-kitchens (in German , in French, ) were set up in Germany, France, England and elsewhere.Clarkson, pp. 55–56 In the 1840s the chef Alexis Soyer established a soup-kitchen in the East End of London to feed Huguenot silk weavers impoverished by cheap imports.Cowen, pp. 120–121 During the Irish famine, which began in 1845, he set up a kitchen in Dublin capable of feeding a thousand people an hour.Ray, Elizabeth. "Soyer, Alexis Benoît (1810–1858)" , Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2011.
In the United States soup-kitchens were set up in the 1870s. During the Great Depression, Al Capone established and sponsored a soup-kitchen in Chicago.Clarkson, p, 57 In the same period the Salvation Army ran similar operations elsewhere in the US and in Canada, Australia and Britain.Schetterer, June. "Salvation Army80 Years of Service in New Rochelle", The Standard-Star, 8 May 1969, p. 4; and "Soup Kitchen is Opened for Needy in City", Shawnee News-Star, 20 December 1931, p. 15; "Salvation Army Feeding Many Hungry Hoboes", The Cornwall Freeholder, 31 January 1931, p. 1; "The Tragedy of Unemployment", The Williamstown Advertiser, 15 June 1929, p. 4; and "Soup Kitchen Opens", Cheltenham Chronicle, 10 Nov 1934, p. 5
Regional cuisines Asia
In Asian countries soup became a familiar breakfast dish, but has not, according to Clarkson, done so in the West.Clarkson, pp. 107–108 In China and Japan, soup came to have a different place in meals. As in the west, there was a distinction between thick and thin soups, but the latter would often be treated as a beverage, to be drunk from the bowl rather than eaten with a spoon. In Japan miso soup became the best known of the thick type, with many variations on the basic theme of dashi, a stock made from kombu (edible seaweed) and dried fermented tuna, with miso (fermented soy bean) paste. Clarkson writes, "Miso soup is the traditional breakfast soup in the ordinary home, and the traditional end to a formal banquet".Clarkson, p. 106 Ramen, a noodle soup, popular in Japan and latterly internationally, is documented only from the second half of the nineteenth century.Tsu, Timothy Y. "Review of Slurp! A Social and Culinary History of RamenJapan’s Favorite Noodle Soup, by Barak Kushner", The Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1, 2014, pp. 224–226
In China, soups wholly unknown in the west were developed, including bird's nest and shark's fin soups.Clarkson, pp. 106–107 Snake soup continues to be an iconic tradition in Cantonese culture, and that of Hong Kong.Landry Yuan, Félix et al. "Conservation and Cultural Intersections within Hong Kong’s Snake Soup Industry", Oryx, Vol. 57, No. 1, 2023, p. 40 In China, rat soup is considered the equal of oxtail soup.Davidson and Jaine, p. 673
Indian cuisine includes (sometimes called pepper-water), a thin, spicy soup, typically made with lentils, tomatoes, and seasonings including tamarind, pepper, and chillies. In Thai cuisine are soups: the most popular are made with prawns and made from galangal, chicken and coconut milk.Davidson and Jaine, p. 817 is a Vietnamese soup, usually made from beef stock and spices with noodles and thinly sliced beef or chicken added. In Filipino cookery is a soup made with meat, shrimp, or fish and flavoured with a sour ingredient such as tamarind or guava; also from the Philippines is , a goat soup.Davidson, p. 342 The soups of Indonesia include (chicken), (shrimp with rice vermicelli) and (crab).Anderson (1995), pp. 18–20 and 24 is a soup served in the Maldives, with chunks of tuna in it.Davidson and Jaine, p. 487