New Generation Thinkers: A social history of soup

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2021

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The potato famine saw a Dublin barracks turned into place where starving people were given six minutes to eat their soup in silence. Tom Scott-Smith researches humanitarian relief and his Essay takes us from the father of the modern soup kitchen in 1790 Bavaria and the meaning of "to rumfordize" to Boston, America a hundred years later and a recipe developed by an MIT Professor, Ellen Swallow Richards, which dunked meat in condensed milk and flour. What lessons about society's values can we take from their different recipes for soup?

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Tom Scott-Smith is Associate Professor of Refugee Studies and Forced Migration at the University of Oxford. He has published a book called On an Empty Stomach: Two Hundred Years of Hunger Relief, and taken part in a film project Shelter without Shelter which was the winner of one of the 2020 AHRC Research in Film Awards. This research was featured in an exhibition staged by the Imperial War Museum which you can hear about in the Free Thinking episode called Refugees.. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to chose ten academics each year who use their research to make radio programmes.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps
0:21.2	it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream
0:26.1	van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds,
0:34.5	music, radio, podcasts. Welcome to the Arts and Ideas podcast.
0:39.6	I'm Tom Scott Smith, and my essay is called A Social History of Soup.
0:44.7	There's something about soup that makes it good for emergencies.
0:48.7	I'm not just talking about culinary emergencies either,
0:51.5	although soup is certainly useful for those.
0:58.0	If you have a fridge of leftovers and some guests imminently arriving, soup is quick and easy to rustle up.
1:01.0	This makes it useful for humanitarian emergencies too.
1:05.0	You can make soup for many ingredients around,
1:08.0	a chunk of meat, a few potatoes, some grains, and all you need is a pot
1:13.6	and a source of heat.
1:15.6	Soup can be easily scaled up or watered down to feed more people if needed, and it can offer
1:22.6	more than simple nutrition, as well as hot food in the belly, it can provide the warmth of human companionship,
1:30.3	sitting with others, eating together, sharing food from the same pot.
1:35.3	For all these reasons, soup has been a mainstay of emergency relief for centuries.
1:40.3	It was a staple of the medieval arms house in Britain, and could be found in many other traditions as well, such as the Imaret in the Ottoman Empire.
1:49.0	But in 19th century Europe, the soup kitchen was transformed. It was scaled up for an industrial society.
1:58.0	Its recipes were written down and standardised.
2:01.6	Soup was even reduced, bottled, made portable and exported overseas.
2:07.6	But if we look at four examples in that journey, from the watery gruel of Oliver Twist to a more scientific and rational approach,
	...

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