The first soup

Did you know …

That soup wasn’t invented until the 15th century? It’s true! It seems so obvious, right? The only way to make eating better is, clearly, to make it more like drinking. But people didn’t figure out a way to do that until the 1400s were almost over.

The first soup chefs were actually doctors. To treat patients with throat ailments, they would often place chicken parts in a recumbent patient’s open mouth and then pour boiling water into the orifice. When the doctors noticed that a) some of the chicken parts disappeared down “the foode pitte,” and that b) some of the patients didn’t die, they realized that they had something big on their hands.

It took a couple hundred more years of development before soup became anything like the nourishing, relatively safe dish we know and love today, but that’s where it all started!