Soup and the British
The Food Programme
BBC
4.4 • 976 Ratings
🗓️ 15 February 2015
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From a hearty warming bowl of chunky soup on a frosty Winter's day to the smooth comfort of home-made chicken soup when you're ill, the British, it seems, love soup. We spend £762million a year and the market's growing with trendy exotic flavours spicing up the choice on offer new gadgets to help make the dish and slimmers replacing juicing with 'souping', it's gaining pace.
Tim Hayward is passionate that this dish is more than simply an appetiser and keen to stamp out memories of wishy-washy, tasteless broths. Past horrors had made it a laughing stock with 'Brown Windsor Soup' being the punchline of many jokes in the 50s and symbolic of austerity and low-quality catering. He searches out the roots of this much-mocked comic dish, alongside Turtle and Bombay duck varieties, and seeks to clear its name.
Along the way he meets the man who made millions and revolutionised the market with fresh soups which are stealing our hearts from the old tins, gets top tips from the 'Soupsayer' and spins the colour wheel at the pub whose soup is always a mystery but 'never vegetarian'.
Presented by Tim Hayward. Produced by Anne-Marie Bullock.
Transcript
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| 0:52.6 | UK slash Radio 4 and now enjoy the podcast Soup, a single syllable, denoting the very simplest of foods and surely one of the oldest |
| 1:18.0 | ways of serving. |
| 1:20.0 | The British seem to have an almost religious belief in its powers to steady, strengthen and |
| 1:23.5 | fortify. We love it rough and rustic, with big chunks of veg and frozen fingers cupped around |
| 1:29.4 | the steaming bowl. Yet it can also come limpid, clear and jewel-like as a sophisticated consumme. |
| 1:35.2 | As sales of soup in the UK continue to soar, the famous and fashionable are souping to get skinny. |
| 1:40.9 | The soup maker is the countertop gadget of the moment. And even simple stock has been |
| 1:44.9 | reinvented as bone broth, soup with supposedly transformative powers. There's something in my soup. |
| 1:57.0 | Soup is evidently a complex business. |
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