The lightweight joys of soup

This past week's double whammy of cold weather and school-closing flu actually has been good for Iowans. It's reminded us all of the joys of soup.

Soup is an underappreciated food, relegated at best to the role of appetizer. In summer, cans of it sit at the back of cupboards, waiting for winter's return.

The healing power of soup rivals any home remedy. Indeed, chicken broth was prescribed by physicians more than 2100 years ago in ancient Greece.

In the late 1970s, a medical study demonstrated that chicken broth promotes the flow of air and mucus in nasal passages and clears up congestion better than control liquids of hot and cold water.

During the next decade, researchers identified an amino acid - released when cooking a chicken - that actively thins the mucus in the lungs. If chilies, garlic, and spices are added to chicken soup, they further loosen phlegm and act as expectorants.

Of course, such findings are enough to turn anyone off to soup.

But the real power of soup, I suspect, has less to do with air flow and amino acids than the image of your mother quietly entering your room, where as a child you lay miserable and sniffing in your bed. She's carrying a tray of buttered toast, 7-Up and the only thing you really can consume just then: a warm bowl of chicken soup. And better than even the best nurse at the best hospital ever possibly could, she pats your head, fluffs up your pillow and offers soothing words of comfort.

It's chicken soup for the soul, as they say.

Soup goes way back in human evolution. Stone Age men quickly invented it after discovering fire (necessary to warm the broth) and after developing stone tools for cutting (necessary to slicing meat and chopping herbs for the soup). Scientists say Neanderthals probably enjoyed soup as far back as 80,000 BCE. Neanderthals, by the way, lived during the Ice Age.

Just imagine their delicacies: mammoth gazpacho, sopa de reindeer, alphabet soup (which consisted only of the letters U, G and H).

When modern humans entered Neanderthal territory, we likely learned soup-making from them. Guess the Neanderthals weren't so dumb, after all.

But soup isn't just ingrained in the genes because it benefited us during our evolution. No, soup is essential to the obtaining of higher ideas, such as liberty and abstract art.

In 1777, as George Washington's troops winter camped at Valley Forge, the ragged band avoided starvation thanks to soup. Faced with hardly any food in the army stores, the camp cook mixed tripe and peppercorn with boiling water to feed the ragged band. Thus was born America's famous pepperpot soup.

The revolutionary army survived the winter, and we all know what happened after that.

A few years later, Thomas Jefferson would contemplate soup in his essay "Observations on Soup." Like soup, itself, this piece is much underappreciated and rarely mentioned in his biographies. But he did write it.

Unfortunately, part of soup's bad image can be blamed on Iowan Herbert Hoover. During the Great Depression, lines at soup kitchens ran long. After that experience, Americans really didn't want soup if they had a choice.

But in 1961 Andy Warhol came to soup's rescue. His 32 Campbell's Soup Cans turned a run-of-the-mill grocery store item into high art. Somehow, Warhol saw what Jefferson had recognized more than a century-and-a-half before: There's more to soup than just hot water and some flavoring.

What they saw was the sweetness in one of life's most simplest pleasures.

These days, a lot of Americans are worried about the lagging economy and impending war. Those who look farther out see looming environmental dangers.

We need an occasional simple pleasure to lessen the load.

So whenever you start feeling down, reach into your pantry and remember what William McKinley (a much underappreciated president) cried out at a news conference in 1897: "What this country needs is a good 10-ounce can of condensed soup!"

Tastes, er, sounds, good to me.

(originally published Jan. 27, 2003)