Etiquette and Appreciation of Soup

What Have We Here? — A Gilded Age place setting with a French écuelle. An écuelle is a 2 handled bowl, generally with a cover to keep soup hot. The écuelle is perfect for a broth or light soup. A small round (bouillon) soup spoon sits to the right. – From the book, “Yesteryear… More of What Have We Here?: The Etiquette and Essentials of Past Times to the Mid-20th Century”

NEW YORK Every eater has a special set of gastronomic obsessions. One of my most persistent has to do with hot soup, by which I really mean hot ' soup. Anything less than a curtain of steam that obscures an eating partner across the table is to me soup that borders on the tepid, a soup that must be hurried through before it is actually cold and therefore inedible. 

Today one is generally served soup that ranges from barely tepid to very warm. Or which, at best, is Just a few degrees above body temperature, so that it feels hot to the lips but dies a chilly death by the time it reaches the back of the tongue. Nor do a few wan wisps of rising steam prove that soup is really hot. but merely that the liquid is somewhat warmer than the room in which it is being served. 

A combination of reasons Is behind this creeping tepidism that is understandable, if not excusable. For one thing, hardly anyone under 45 really knows what hot means when related to soup. At least two generations separate today's eaters from forbears who emigrated from Russia, Germany, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and China, where even today Microwave, like it not, hot soup is taken seriously. 

Ever frugal, wise old housewives served soup so hot that the preheated tureens added to the warmth of the room and one could thaw winter chilled hands by sliding them over the outside of the bowl. Finally, when eaten, these soups served as personalized central heating systems. Hot soup has also met Its demise partly at the hands of etiquette snobs who decry blowing on broth or slurping It from a spoon. Many restaurants deliberately serve tepid soup for economic reasons. If they are relatively inexpensive eating places that rely on turnover, they cannot afford to have chairs occupied an extra 10 minutes per seating by customers waiting for soup (or coffee, tea or cocoa) to cool. 

To work one's way through a bowlful of incendiary soup is to pass through several stages of enjoyment, almost Oriental In their subtle refinements. Start with a bowl of soup that is topped by a mushroom cloud of steam, a soup that is still atremble with its own inner heat, and you begin by inhaling a heady essence, as the scent pervades your nostrils long before its substance can touch your tongue. Soon you pick up a small amount on the tip of the spoon and between whispering sips and lightly exhaled, cooling puffs, you begin carefully to get a sense of what the liquid portion of the soup holds in store. 

These early sips must exclude solids, still too hot to handle in the throat. In a few minutes the soup is merely hot and larger mouthfuls can be handled, revealing liquid and solids in full-bodied splendor. After that, and eating ever more quickly, the warm soup is a luxurious comfort, full of taste but allowing freedom from caution. Now you can really consider the tastes behind tastes, the textures of solids, the herbs and pot vegetables that perfume the brew. As always when eating soup, intermittent bites of bread renew the palate to the subtleties of the liquid. – By Mimi Sheraton, New York Times News Service, 1979

 🍽️Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber of The RSVP Institute of Etiquette, is the Site Editor of the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia