Ten Soups, Ten Stories

On December 3, 2024, UNESCO's Intergovernmental Committee, meeting in Paraguay, inscribed Tom Yum Goong on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The Thai government describes the dish as a reflection of riverside village life and simplicity.

There is also a documented trail. An 1890 cookbook, Tamra Kap Khao, includes a snakehead-fish tom yum that uses the sourness of green mango. An 1898 recipe collection compiled by students at a Bangkok girls' school also records tom yum.

Tom Yum Goong follows two lineages: the clear nam sai, and the cloudy white nam khon. The divide comes down to milk — evaporated or coconut — and whether it is added; some versions also use a roasted chili paste.

This pot belongs to the same 'tom' (to boil) family as tom yum, yet it walked in the opposite direction. Kha (galangal), named in the dish, and coconut milk — together the two form a mellow, white counter-answer to the acidity-led nam sai tom yum.

No record has been confirmed that pins down its origin. A foundation under Thailand's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has published an explanation, but no document indicating when the dish took shape has been found. This card instead looks at the contrast in structure.

Phở is said to have begun in the early twentieth century, around Nam Định Province and Hanoi in the north. Two theories stand side by side over the name: one traces it to the French stew pot-au-feu, the other to the Cantonese term for 'beef noodle,' 牛肉粉. Linguists are said to favor the latter, though the question remains unsettled. Beef became accessible under French rule, and there was already a noodle culture from Chinese immigrant communities. The most accurate statement is simply that phở was born at that intersection.

In 1954, when the Geneva Accords split the country into north and south, phở traveled south along with people from the north. Northern phở stayed spare, with few toppings, while southern phở diverged into a version where bean sprouts and herbs are served separately, for the diner to compose. One soup mirrors the country's history directly.

In the Nara and Heian periods, miso was still a preserved food, not yet a soup. It is said to have turned into a soup in the Kamakura period, once the suribachi mortar — brought over from the continent — made it possible to dissolve miso into liquid. Tsurezuregusa records a passage in which Hōjō Tokiyori, a regent of the Kamakura shogunate, set out nothing more than a single dish of miso at the table. Soybean cultivation spread in the Muromachi period, and by the Edo period, miso reached nearly every table.

In 1908, Kikunae Ikeda of Tokyo Imperial University extracted glutamate from kombu dashi and named it 'umami.' In 1913, Shintaro Kodama identified inosinate in katsuobushi. When the two meet, umami intensifies beyond simple addition — and the dashi in miso soup is a mechanism that has put this synergy to daily use ever since.

And underneath miso lies koji — the technique of growing Aspergillus oryzae on steamed grain, the same technique used in sake.

The word minestrone is an augmentative of minestra (soup), tracing back to the Latin for 'to serve.' There is no fixed recipe. Rice goes in, in Lombardy; pesto is stirred in, in Liguria; the contents shift from household to household. It is a soup in which the kitchen wisdom of wasting nothing — cucina povera — became, in effect, the name of the dish itself.

Some accounts trace its origin back to ancient Rome, but that speaks only to the antiquity of simmering vegetables, not to a confirmed lineage for this dish. One thing is certain: the tomato in the red minestrone we picture today only entered the picture after arriving from the New World in the sixteenth century.

The beginning is said to be Marseille fishermen simmering the bony rockfish left unsold at market, and eating it on the beach. Some accounts trace it back to the Greek colonies of the pre-Christian era, but neither story can be confirmed by record.

What is certain is 1980. In response to a flood of low-quality 'bouillabaisse' in tourist areas, Marseille's restaurants drew up a charter together. Mediterranean rockfish, including scorpionfish, must be used. Saffron must be used whole, in its stigma form, not powdered. The rouille must be house-made. The broth and the fish must be served on separate plates. It carries no legal force — it is a moral agreement among the restaurants that signed it. Even so, this document has kept the outline of a bowl of soup intact.

The name borscht is said to come from an old Slavic word for hogweed, a wild plant. The original form is said to have been a sour soup made from its fermented stalks and leaves, with beets becoming the centerpiece only later. This red soup has long been eaten across a wide region — not only in Ukraine, but in Poland's barszcz, and at tables in Lithuania, Belarus, and Jewish communities.

On July 1, 2022, UNESCO's Intergovernmental Committee, at an extraordinary session, inscribed 'Culture of Ukrainian Borscht Cooking' on the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding — an unusually expedited review. What the inscription protects is the practice of cooking and passing on borscht in Ukraine, not a ruling on which nation the dish belongs to. The inscription document itself records the diversity of its recipes and occasions for eating it.

In the traditional method, kvass — beets fermented in salted water through lactic fermentation — forms the core of the acidity. It is the acid of fermentation, not vinegar.

The red gazpacho we picture today is not this dish's first form. The original was white: stale bread, almonds, garlic, olive oil, water. The cold white soup known as ajoblanco came first, and the red version was born only after tomatoes and peppers arrived from the New World in the sixteenth century. Accounts trace it back to Roman porridge, or credit the Moors with bringing almonds, but neither story can be confirmed by record.

What is certain is that this is Andalusia's summer soup, one that needs no fire. What comes from the field is crushed cold and drunk as it is. The choice to serve it chilled was itself an answer to this region's heat.

Samgyetang carries with it the phrase i yeol chi yeol — 'controlling heat with heat.' It is a custom of meeting the height of summer's heat, the days known as sambok, with a hot soup. A young chicken is stuffed whole with glutinous rice, ginseng, garlic, and jujube, then simmered.

It is sometimes described as an ancient royal-court dish, but by the record, it is said to be more recent. A 1917 cookbook contains a recipe for stuffing a chicken's cavity with glutinous rice and powdered ginseng, and by the 1940s it reportedly began appearing in restaurants under the name gyesamtang. From the 1950s onward, as refrigeration spread and ginseng could be used whole, by the root, rather than as powder, the dish is said to have shifted toward samgyetang — its current name, in which ginseng now comes before chicken. It could fairly be called a dish whose name changed along with its technology.

In Hungarian, gulyás was originally not the name of a dish but a word for a cattle herdsman. Herdsmen of the plains are said to have simmered meat and onion in an iron pot called a bogrács, and that pot became the dish, name and all.

The paprika that defines gulyás today came later. Chili peppers are a New World crop, reaching Europe only in the sixteenth century. This is where the foundation was laid for the herdsman's stew to meet an Age of Discovery spice, though its settling into today's red gulyás came still later. There is one more common misunderstanding: Hungarian gulyás is a thin, unthickened soup, while the rich stew often pictured is actually a separate dish called pörkölt. As it crossed borders, the name and the substance traded places.