But why soup? Well the easy answer is that, in all its versatility and possibilities, soup is one of my all-time favorite food groups. Yes. It is a food group in my world! It is not uncommon to plan Soup Dates with my girlfriends, or guy friends, or acquaintances, or really anybody that will tolerate this fascination of mine. And for somebody like me, a former Washingtonian trapped in terribly sunny and bright Los Angeles, soup means cozying up on the couch with a blanket, the fireplace and a rainstorm outside – an occurrence that happens not nearly as often as ideal in this land of supposedly perfect weather.
But digging deeper, there is something about soup that, to me, is culturally expansive. I think back to the earliest days of our cooking ancestors and think that soup was probably in the very earliest versions of their dreadfully bland and slightly disgusting cookbooks. After all, the most primitive peoples and civilizations could only thrive around water sources and it is a known fact that water-heavy sustenance has a tendency to fill you up faster and for much longer than say, dried up twigs and leaves. It’s not hard to imagine soup evolving century to century, culture to culture from what was probably those same dried up twigs and leaves boiled in water (maybe to include a recent mammoth hunting victory on good day) to the classics of French Onion and the inexplicably adored Chicken Noodle to the sometimes appallingly grotesque modern day concoctions that saturate Pinterest on any given day. (This brief history of soup, of course, is purely speculation and speculation I choose to standby until more evidence becomes available.) In this millennia long evolutionary path Soup becomes synonymous with Life.
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