The Wit’s Guide to Soup

Or, liquid overtures

Woman Appropriately Taciturn About Soup, Peter Jacob Horemans, 1764

In the beginning, there was soup. Primordial soup, a lumpy mixture of organic compounds that, with a dash of lightning and a twist of pepper, eventually became us. Amino acids into proteins into DNA into amoebas into fish into dinosaurs into chickens into chicken soup, and thus, with a side of saltines, the circle of life was complete.

“At birth, we emerge from dream soup. At death, we sink back into dream soup. In between soups, there is a crossing of dry land.”
— Tom Robbins

In the Book of Genesis, identical twins Jacob and Esau had to decide who was born first and thus the rightful leader of the family. Esau technically did escape the womb earlier but, the story goes, he traded his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of soup. And the kicker, the part that makes it truly biblical in its magnitude and import, the part that we have to take on faith because it defies rational explanation: It was lentil soup. 

“I live on good soup, not fine words.”
— Moliere

Soup, at its base, is a funny word. Hence the movie title Duck Soup as well as the fly-in-my soup routine, most thoroughly exploited in the Morecambe and Wise joke book as follows:

SERVEE: Waiter — there’s a fly in my soup!
SERVER: They don’t care what they eat, do they, sir?
SERVEE: But what’s it doing there?
SERVER: It looks like the breaststroke to me, sir.
SERVEE: I can’t believe it! A fly in my soup!
SERVER: Don’t make a fuss, sir, they'll all want one.
SERVEE: But it looks like it’s dead!
SERVER: Yes, it’s the heat that kills them.

Irreplicable scholarly study of this routine has found that waiters exhibiting this sort of humour generally receive higher tips, though the flies remain dead.

“Memories are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them.”
— P.G. Wodehouse

If you hate chewing, soup is for you. In the court of Louis XI, also known as Louis the Prudent, ladies were said to have subsisted on consomme and broths to avoid the swole jaws that inevitably accompany the ingestion of solid foods. Contrast this to the recent trend of young men chewing stale gum to enhance their jaw lines to reveal an eternal truth: Vanity is its own punishment.

“Cold soup is a very tricky thing and it is a rare hostess who can carry it off. More often than not the dinner guest is left with the impression that had he only come a little earlier he could have gotten it while it was still hot.”
— Fran Lebowitz

Elsewhere in Apocryphal Soups of the French Monarchy, Louis XV, aka Louis the Beloved, was said to be so terrified of being poisoned that he had multiple food tasters sample every dish. This led to the creation of vichyssoise, a potato and leek soup that cooled so thoroughly during the many tastings that it was easier to simply serve it cold. 

“No, I don’t take soup. You can’t build a meal on a lake.”
—  Elsie De Wolfe

Soup made more sense before spoons, writes Margaret Visser in The Rituals of Dinner. Back then, it was more of a thick, savoury beverage. The word soup (and the word supper) come from sop, describing what you’d do with a hunk of bread. But then it devolved into “merely a liquid overture to a banquet.” 

“I could eat alphabet soup and shit better lyrics.”
—  Johnny Mercer

And so the long and brothy history of this fluid foodstuff leads us to one unavoidable conclusion: Anyone with the last name Campbell can appropriately be nicknamed Soupy. That goes double for the 19th prime minister of Canada, Kim “Soupy” Campbell.

“He’s the only man I ever knew who had rubber pockets so he could steal soup.”
— Wilson Mizner

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Speaking of hot liquids

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“If a lump of soot falls into the soup, and you cannot conveniently get it out, stir it well in, and it will give the soup a high French taste.”
— Jonathan Swift

Soup is always a hard course to follow. Oh wait, it’s the obvious course to follow.

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Soup, there it is: The 264th issue of Get Wit Quick, your weekly tour of the best lines on the best things that come in bowls. Though soup is always better out of a mug, right? Just like root beer. And the best soups are made from roots, except for mulligatawny, which I recently learned is made from owls. No head-swiveling birds were inconvenienced in the publication of my book  Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. If this newsletter made you think about soup, please tap the ❤️ below.