Mr. Big Food’s compilation of recipes is titled The Big Food Manual and Survivalist Flourishing Guide. It has tens of thousands of recipes he’s culled from his collection of old cookbooks. But in addition to the recipes, he’s also preserved a lot of information and history on food that those old cook books contained.

Here’s an example from The Creative Cook, published by the Campbell Soup Company (1978).

ELEGANT SOUPS

From The Creative Cook (1978)

If bread is the staff of life, soup is the food that restores the spirit. It can be made in wondrous variety. There is truly a soup to fit every nuance of mood, to set perfectly the spirit of the occasion.

Soup goes back to the very earliest roots of man. From its humble beginning, it has developed as the sign of the aristocrat, the source of inspiration for the artist, a mirror of custom and culture.

From the simple maxim, “Who soups long, lives long,” to the worldly-wise “Of soup and love, the first is best,” hundreds of sayings have become part of the lore of soup. Brillant-Savarin, the famous 18th century gastronome, even proposed that a woman who could not make soups should not be allowed to marry!

Soups may be classified into three main groups: thin, clear soups like bouillon, broth, and consommé, which may be lightly garnished with vegetables or pasta; cream soups, such as bisques or chowders; and thick, hearty ones with various combinations of ingredients including legumes, meat and fish.

Clear soups can be hot or cold, jellied or liquid and may be presented as an elegant overturn to a meal. When served in this fashion, they stimulate the appetite and imagination. Selection of the soup is important as it sets the stage for the main production, the entrée.

Cream soups can also be served as the appetizer, or may play a more central role in a light supper or luncheon. Again, good planning is important, so the soup functions as the counterpoint of flavor, texture, color and temperature to the rest of the meal.

These versatile soups—both cream and clear—have also traditionally been used as a beverage to be sipped when reading or studying, or after brisk winter walks, or as a mid-morning or afternoon “break.” Soup has long been food and drink for the weary spirit.

Heavy, hearty soups are the meal-in-one dishes that have nourished mankind for centuries. These had their roots in the peasant men but, like home weaving, they have suffered from cyclical winds of fashion. Once people become more affluent, their country dishes were shunned. Today, however, the tide is turning back to thick, satisfying soups as main courses.

Good stock is the foundation of good soup. Traditionally, it has been produced through long, slow cooking of meat, poultry or fish with vegetables for flavoring. Now this time-consuming procedure can be eliminated if you use canned condensed soups as the base for creative soup-making. The recipe for chilled Cucumber A La Crème Soup is quickly put together by starting with condensed chicken broth and blending it with cucumbers, onion and cream.

[Recall the book is published by Campbell’s!]

More below the fold

Preparation time for the Old Fashioned Vegetable Soup is considerably shortened by using condensed beef broth and condensed vegetable soup instead of simmering a stock for many long hours. Time is saved yet the flavor is not compromised.

Sometimes, combing two condensed soups, such as tomato and consommé, produces a base with a consistency in flavor which would be difficult to repeat time after time starting from scratch. For example, these soups, when mixed, make an excellent and quick beginning for Tomato Mushroom Consomme.

Beautiful main course soups like Brunswick Stew, Pot a Feu, Shellfish Chowder, Bouillabaisse, Ukranian Borscht, and others included here, which are usually time-consuming to prepare, can readily be considered for today’s menus, thanks to condensed soups. This chapter, with recipes from many national cuisines, is an adventure in tastes and flavors.

The history of soup is long and colorful. There is speculation as to just how prehistoric man first boiled foods, and thus made soup. Since pottery did not evolve until about 6000 B.C., soup-makers before that had to rely on nature’s provisions for containers. One theory proposes that pits were dug in the ground and lined with overlapping stones to prevent seepage and then filled with liquid to be “cooked.” The water was brought to a boil by heating other stones and dropping them into the water.

Another idea suggests that concave mollusk or amphibian shells served as stewing pots. Still another points to the use of animal skins suspended over the fire as cooking utensils.

One fact is certain: people have been writing about soup for a long time. Two early literary references talk about lentil soup. The first is a Biblical reference in Genesis about Esau’s selling his birthright to his brother Jacob for lentil soup. The other is a recipe for lentil and haricot bean soup from the first known cookbook written by the Roman Apicius in the first century A.D.

During the Middle Ages, soup was an important mainstay of the peasant diet, often feeding large numbers of people in times of war and famine On the other end of the scale, the aristocracy indulged themselves on soups, sometimes feasting on four or more different varieties during the course of one banquet. Because of the limited number of eating implements at this time, diners ate their soup by soaking bread in it and then eating the bread.

Soup has played an important role in the lives of many famous people, even affecting the course of war, politics and music. When George Washington was despairing at the fate of his troops during the winter of 1777-1778 at Valley Forge, he called on his chef to create a morally uplifting dish for his suffering troops. The chef produced pepper pot soup from a few scanty provisions, and rallied the troops.

Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria both enjoyed starting their busy days with mutton broth for breakfast. Guiseppe Verdi even claimed that his inspiration for composing music came from a steaming bowl of soup.

To soup goes the credit for the addition of the word, restaurant, to our language. In the mid 1700s in France, soups were called restaurants, the French word for restorative, because they were rumored to have therapeutic powers. A Parisian named Boulanger, in an effort to advertise that he sold soup, hung the name restaurant on a signboard and proclaimed: “Come all ye that labor and I will restore you.” Gradually, the word restaurant became identified with eating place instead of with soup.

Soup was one of man’s first convenience foods: travelers on the Mayflower subsisted largely on soups hung in pots from overhead beams. In winter, New Englanders hung pots of soup in outdoor sheds with a paddle in the middle of the pot. Then when the mixture froze, the pot would be removed and the hunk of soup would be hung by a hole in the paddle handle. As needed, chunks were chopped off and heated.

At the end of the 19th century, Abram Anderson and Joseph Campbell introduced canned condensed soup. A few years later, in 1900, The Campbell Soup Company gained international recognition. A gold medallion, signifying excellence, was awarded to Campbell at the Paris Exhibition that year, and the familiar red and white can still proudly bears the medallion.