It’s soup season in the interior! As winter grinds on and we hunker down inside, many of us will step up our consumption of nourishing, communal and comforting meals of soups and stews. This week’s column salutes the warm, timeless and so-very-human tradition of broth with an archaeological tour of this culinary staple.
Soup, when you think about it, is a game-changing invention for humanity: water-based meals allow for the cooking of otherwise undigestible raw foods like grains, the extraction of essential calories, minerals and nutrients from bones, and the varied use of dried meats, fish, and plants. They provide easy nourishment to the very young and very old, and to sick and disabled people who otherwise have difficulty with solid foods. And they’re comfort in a bowl (or an animal skin).
As much as a spit-roasted animal is a quintessential image of early human cuisine, it’s very likely that soup is as old as cooking itself. While discarded animal bones, shells, seeds, and other chunky dietary remains are easy to identify in the archaeological record, evidence for compound foods is comparatively rare. This is both because fragmentary organics preserve poorly over time, and because identifying complex mixes and preparations is a real challenge for the science of food residue analysis, which rely on trace elements left behind on cooking pots, implements, or features such as ovens and hearths.
Archaeological signatures of soup- and stew-making often come from what we call “indirect evidence”—clues left in archaeological sites that suggest behaviours or products we can no longer see. These include boiling stones, and the fire-cracked rock that is left of them, greasy pit features, chemically-transformed foods (grains), food packaging (barks), and ceramic or metal cooking vessels.
Boiling bones to create a nutritious broth was very likely the first widespread approach to soup. Archaeologists have inferred broth-making from stone-age site assemblages in which the ends of long bones were notably missing—the parts containing abundant collagen, an important source of protein in pre-industrial diets.
The first soups were made long before metal or clay cooking pots. Immersion heating using “boiling stones” heated in fires then deposited in water have been used for cooking worldwide. These stones can be dropped in water-tight baskets or vessels made of wood, gourd, or gut to boil or steam foods. Before this even, skin-lined pits dug in the ground made serviceable containers, into which food and hot rocks were dropped. Intriguingly, archaeologists and survivalists have found that materials considered too flammable for direct heat, like bark, animal skin, and even plastic can be used to boil water over open flame without disintegrating.
Archaeologists infer that “wet-cooking” using boiling water was used by humans during the Middle Paleolithic, an enormous span of time from 300,000 to 30,000 years ago. Evidence from Belgium and Iraq suggest that boiling stones were likely used by Neanderthals to cook grains 36,000 years ago.
Soup likely became more serious eats once vessels that could more reliably resist high temperatures and moisture were developed, and which allowed for preparation of greater volumes of food. Fragments of clay pots found at Xianren Cave in China dating to around 20,000 years ago are believed to be among the oldest known ceramic cooking vessels, which became more widespread after about 10,000 years ago. Another Chinese site in the ancient capital of Xian revealed a 2,400 year-old lidded bronze cooking vessel, which was found sealed—with soup still inside!
Vessels like these also allow archaeologists to identify carbonized remains, and protein and lipid residue analyses can extract and identify chemical signatures of the specific plants and animals cooked. From a single clay vessel found in Southern Ontario, scientists found traces of a 1,300 year-old stew made of pickerel, bass, sturgeon, deer, and seasoned with walnuts and purslane.
Here on the Interior Plateau, soups and stews have long been an Indigenous dietary staple, where dehydration was a primary method of processing foods for storage. Dried meats, fish, and berries stored in cache pits bring flavour, variety, and nutrition to mid-winter diets. Roots, bulbs and tubers that were roasted, dried, and ground in season were added to thicken soups and provide valuable carbohydrates and vitamins.
Making and sharing soups is part of the continuity of human experience. Since time out of mind, families have gathered around hearths and ovens, pits and pots, to prepare and enjoy the liquid nourishment of this communal meal. From bone broth to hearty stews, from special occasion treats to whatever’s-in-the-cellar specials, soup has always sustained us. Here’s to good food made with love.