All About Chicken Noodle Soup by Karla Stover

 

By The Same Author:

Parlor Girls                                     An Everleigh Sisters (world famous madams) bio.

Wynter's Way                                    A Gothic Novel

Murder" When One Isn't Enough    A Puget Sound / Hood Canal murder mystery

A Line to Murder                             A Tacoma, WA / Puget Sound murder mystery

Visit Karla's BWL Author page for book and purchase information

One of the fondest memories I have of my maternal grandmother is of her chicken noodle soup. I used to go to her house to help her clean cupboards and she'd have the stock simmering on the stove and homemade noodles drying on racks.

Jump ahead forty-odd years. There is a dinner near our home which makes its BLT with piles of bacon - - a favorite of my husband, but it never has chicken noodle soup. I asked so many times one of the waitresses (not wait staff, it's not that kind of place) told me they only have it on special occasions. Good grief, we're not talking about haute cuisine here, just a comfort food.

Who first put noodles in broth is up to debate. Chickens were domesticated around 7,000 to 10,000 years ago in Southeast Asia, but they were valued mainly for their eggs. Many archeologists believe that during the Upper Paleolithic period (which broadly dates to between 50,000 and 12,000 ago) people used "small earth ovens lined with hot rocks" to boil water for cooking meat or root vegetables. Of course, since it's pretty much impossible for historians to agree on anything, other archeologists think that perishable containers full of water were first boiled for cooking either over the fire or directly on hot ashes or stones. 

Under Google's "People Ask," the earliest recorded evidence of chicken soup being used as a therapeutic dish dates back to the ancient Chinese. "In the second century BC, the Chinese medical text, Huangdi Neijing, declared that chicken soup is a “yang food” – a warming dish – to which different therapeutic herbs can be added to cure various diseases."

However, ancient Greeks also had their own version of chicken broth, and chickens were boiled by a wide variety of cultures in Polynesia, Africa, Europe, and elsewhere in Asia. 

As far back as the Middle Ages throughout western Europe and the Mediterranean countries, chicken broth was commonly thought to be healthful though no one knows really why. It was thought to ease digestion and was supposed to be easier to digest than solids. Sick people were advised to consume broth. Some historians say recommending broth to an invalid "may have been related  to the body's four humors." And finally, others said that at the time there was a prevailing philosophy of "what could be more healthful than a food whose color resembled a human's complexion?" 

In 1465 the Italian gastronomist Bartolomeo Platina published the first cookbook, On Honourable Pleasure and Health. In it is a recipe recommending "chicken broth for the old and infirm."

Enter the Noodle

In Asia, as far back as "the early 1200s" cooks were adding noodles to broth. And by the 1700s Italians were feeding noodle soups to the ill and ailing "because it was easy to digest."

Joan Nathan (sometimes called the Jewish Julia Child) says chicken soup has been on the menu for centuries." She says, Seraphetic Jewish Philosopher Moses Ben Maimon, generally known as Maimonids,  advocated chicken soup as "a panacea for many different things: asthma, weight gain (like bone soup is today), and leprosy." 

Chicken soup came to America in the 16th century when Jews, Mennonites and Amish immigrants introduced it. Soup recipes containing chicken started appearing in various publications in 1824. "However, the term, 'chicken soup' wasn't commonly used until the late 19th century." 

Commercial soup took off in he late 19th century with the invention of canning, however, it became even more popular in 1895 when  an America  chemist named  John Thompson Dorrance found a method to condense it. American manufacturers began producing chicken soup with noodles and in 1934 Campbell's debuted its Noodle with Chicken Soup. Five years later a radio host inadvertently referred to it as Chicken Noodle Soup and the already-popular soup became even more so.

The nutrients in chicken noodle soup make it a healthy food, and its high contents of tryptophan which helps the body produce the mood enhancer serotonin makes it the perfect comfort food.

My husband wants to go the neighborhood dinner tonight and I'm pretty sure the soup will be chowder left over from last night (Friday) and vegetable in a tomato broth. (Ugh!) It wouldn't be so bad but their frequent alternative, French Fried, aren't very good either.