Soup glorious soup!

Soup is such a trying dish.

Don’t misunderstand me, I like soup. True, in a restaurant one always has the vague feeling that the soup is the cheaper choice and the restaurateur laughs all the way to his bank account when he sees patrons happily drinking hot water that he can produce by the bucketful for a few cents. But it does taste good and on a winter’s day what is there better than nourishing, hot soup?

It is perhaps a reflection on the way that I was brought up that, from my experience, soup offers so many opportunities for the solecisms that terrified my mother.

So many things could and usually did go wrong. Soup is a watery, mine strewn plunge pool for the socially inept.

I was always sternly told, with a seriousness that I can still not really understand, that soup was always ‘eaten’ never ‘drunk.’

True, it was rarely offered in a cup when attending a formal meal, but I couldn’t help noticing that my favourite soups were quite clearly liquid with the ostensible eponymous vegetable or meat fibre having been reduced to a silky flowing consistency negating the necessity of chewing. Surely ‘drinking’ was the more obvious activity in its consumption. Such linguistic cavils were regarded as contumacy and were rejected as being merely mischievous.

More adventurous soups like minestrone with interesting bits in them which did necessitate some gentle chewing were seen as reinforcing the ‘eating’ aspect and showing the way for the more namby pamby soups which lacked the muscular viscosity of a true dish of food.

And this philosophical speculation was before you had picked up your spoon and started the socially hazardous process of eating the stuff!

The fact that the menu del dia in my corner restaurant offered soup as the only choice for the first course gave me ample opportunity to revisit my memories of the various prohibitions from my youth.

The restaurant provided baguette already cut into chunky slices. This precluded those lewd fellows of a baser sort from committing the ultimate crime of cutting their bread roll with a knife. I did this as a small child in a restaurant and my mother had the self control to wait until we got home before I was told to Never Do That Again. The knife by my plate I was told was there to allow me to spread butter on the roll which I would have broken in my hands. This was presented to me as one of the unalterable laws to question which would bring about the Fall of Humankind and bring lasting opprobrium on my poor self.

We still, you will note, have not tasted the soup.

The next obstacle was to find the soup spoon. In later years I was told that it was terribly lower middle class to have soup spoons at all (and fish knives and forks and pastry forks) and that dessert spoons were perfectly sufficient for soup – but the finer details of ‘U’ and ‘Non-U’ always left me behind; the jam/conserve controversy confused me and I invariably chose the wrong one in polite society!

Finding the soup spoon (because we were lower middle class) was usually not a problem using the old ‘start from the outside and work in’ principle when it came to cutlery laid out for you.

The real problem with the spoon was how to hold it. Luckily this was not a problem for me as I was told very distinctly how to hold it in a ‘fountain pen’ grip. But not a grip, more of a light balance.

With broken bread and balanced spoon you were now ready to begin the process of eating the soup. Under no circumstances whatsoever and especially if alone, could you blow on the soup to cool it. It might after all be gazpaco or Vichyssoise and the social humiliation of cooling the already cold might well be considered irreparable.

Soup should be taken on to the spoon by drawing the spoon gently away from the diner. At no time should be metal of the spoon touch the sides of the bowl. If you were so inept as to make a scraping sound taking up the soup then you might as well go the whole hog and simply tip the dish into your open mouth!

As the soup approached your mouth the only acceptable way of eating the stuff was to sip from the side of the spoon. Sipping did not mean slurping. To slurp was to put yourself beyond the pale of civilized life. Putting the whole spoon in your mouth was the cultural equivalent of spitting and putting your feet on the table.

As the level of soup slowly decreased (assuming you had managed to master all the necessary techniques to allow your continued presence at the table) it was allowable for you gently to tip the dish away from yourself and gently spoon up the soup.

Any soup adhering to the bottom of the dish and refusing to acquiesce to the laws of gravity had to be regarded as lost as only the most sensitively adept diners were capable of making the nice calculations which allowed them to use the spoon to gather the remaining drops of soup without scraping.

Having finished the soup (and resisting the urge to lick the spoon clean) the said implement should be placed neatly on the plate on which the soup bowl had been placed. In the absence of a supporting plate then the spoon should be placed at right angles to the diner and slightly off centre if the soup plate is flat rimmed or parallel to the diner if the soup bowl is without flat rim.

The table napkin (never, ever, ever a ‘serviette’) may be used to dab (not wipe) the lips.

At no point is it acceptable to put your elbows on the table.

It’s all quite simple really.

And none of the diners I observed in my local restaurant adhered to those rules. I include myself.

But, obviously, I kept to the most important rules, the essential ones.

And ‘we’ all know which they are.