When I’m sick, as I have unfortunately been many times this winter, I turn to a diet of soup, hot water with lemon and honey, and Advil Cold & Sinus. When I’m very sick and can barely manage to feed myself, let alone chop veggies, the soup in question is exclusively a packet of Lipton chicken noodle with an egg dropped in. The poorest (and some may say saddest) version of egg drop soup. But does that cartoonishly yellow broth hit the spot, or what?
Despite our reputation as food snobs and avoiders of all things industrially processed, frozen, canned, or - like this soup - powdered, many Italian-Canadians (at least those I know), always have a place in their cupboards for a box or two of Lipton. Quite some time ago, when I was working as the Italian animator at a summer camp, I asked the younger kids to create menus for their own invented Italian restaurants. Since most of them were Italian-Canadian as well, if they weren’t sure what to include, I asked them to think of what their nonni made at home. At the end of our session together, I laughed as I saw them holding up their big paper menus, many including a line that read “Lipton soup.”
Decided to find a Lipton soup ad from the year I was born and it did not disappointed with the 90s cheesiness.
“Warm, soothing, and satisfying since 1940,” reads the product description, “Lipton soups are made with REAL chicken broth and enriched flavorful noodles, and are a great way to please the entire family!” Throughout the generations, sipped out of a cup or slurped out of a bowl,1 Lipton’s chicken noodle was called upon to fight off colds and other winter bugs, following in the footsteps of many a soup to come before.
In the Lipton-friendly Italian-Canadian househould, this soup becomes another example of how traditions and tastes adapt and push limits in new contexts and with new generations. The soup becomes a part of that hyphenated identity, existing only in a particular place out of a particular experience. And, look, I’m not saying to eschew homemade chicken broth forever (because a homemade broth can and will change your life), but putting aside the food morality is good for us. A little “elevated” Lipton never hurt anyone.
After all, any soup can be egg drop soup if you want it to be, declares Lucas Sin in an article for bon appétit: “You can and should egg drop any soup.” My personal tradition goes back to elementary school. Going home for lunch meant going to nonna Lucia and nonno Michele’s and, usually, having something “con uovo” (with egg). Pastina con uovo: nonna Lucia’s homemade soup made with her chicken broth, small noodles (favourites include stelline and conchigliette because they get stuck to your tongue due to their shell-like shape), and egg. She beats the egg in a separate bowl and then pours the liquid in for the last minute or two of cooking. If you want to get fancy, add some grated parmigiano to the beaten egg before pouring in the boiling broth (yes, I do this with my Lipton, too). Nonna Lucia’s egg drop soup, or stracciatella, as it is more commonly known in Italian,2 always had little bubbles of olive oil on the surface.
Sin describes the egg drop soup as a sublime experience (I agree): the creaminess of the eggs combined with the hot, savoury broth evokes the deepest feelings of comfort, from your gut, to your soul. Its basic ingredients and the significance of soup, more generally, in human history3 means that variations of this dish exist across the globe. While it is hard to trace its exact origin (and I don’t think anyone has as of yet, if ever), we can get an idea of its long history by our side through these variants.
Egg drop soup was made to impress in Cantonese imperial courts.4 The tradition of egg flower soup (as it is literally translated in English) continues as a staple in Chinese-American culture and restaurants to this day. In Laos, mee ka tee, an egg drop soup made from red curry and coconut milk, is typical of Vientiane. France (tourin) and Spain (sopa de ajo) have garlic soups that use egg whites to thicken the broth. Austria (eierflockensuppe) and Poland (kluski lane) both have recipes for a soup where egg “dumplings” are formed by beating them with flour and dropping them into the broth. In Russia, eggs are whisked into a chicken stock which includes semolina. Greek avgolemono, egg and lemon soup, is also similar to other recipes found in Arab, Sephardic Jewish, Turkish, and Balkan cuisine.5 Colombian changua is a breakfast meal of poached eggs in milk with cilantro and scallion.6 Besides the Italian variations, which I will discuss below, these are the examples a quick Google search was able to drum up. I’m sure there are many, many more.7
[1] Mee ka tee, [2] avgolemono, [3] sopa de ajo, [4] kluski lane
Even narrowing it down to the Italian egg drop soups, we can find different possible explanations for their origins. Basic stracciatella is a specialty of Lazio. Various articles online link it to Christmas in the late 19th-century, to stories of families who did not want to let their leftover chicken broth go to waste.8 But evidence of this type of soup goes even further back to the 15th century. In a cookbook called Libro de Arte Coquinaria, the recipes for zanzarelli are reminiscent of stracciatella:
Maestro Martino describes yellow, green, and white zanzarelli. We chose the first, cooked in broth colored with saffron. The green variant requires herb juice instead of saffron, obtained with chard, parsley, and wheat leaves, pounded and sifted with the addition of a bit of water. White zanzarelli, clearly, contain just white ingredients: almond milk, white bread, egg whites, and broth.9
Other examples of eggy soup recipes across Italy include:
Brodo abbrustolito (toasted broth) from Friuli-Venezia Giulia
Minestra all’uovo (rice and egg soup) from Lombardia
Persata (marjoram broth with poached eggs) from Toscana
Sbrodettato di agnello (lamb stew with eggs) from Le Marche10
Sciusceddu Messinese (derived from the Latin juscellum or juscullum, meaning broth or soup) from Messina, in Sicily11
Zuppa alla molisana (Molisana-style soup) from Molise12
If we pause momentarily in Molise (you know we have to), we can find further variations of egg drop or eggy soups:
Spezzato, typical of Duronia and Baranello (and most likely other villages, too). In Duronia, it is served with veal chops. The broth is simply made with the water that the chops are boiled in. Eggs, bread crumbs, and parmigiano are beaten into a paste and dropped into the broth. The baranellese version is made with lamb and without breadcrumbs. Here, rather than creating “dumplings” of dough, the eggs have a more scrambled consistency.
In Guglionesi, pape in sacco is a very particular recipe that calls for - believe it or not - a pillow case. Anita Belinsky, who I interviewed for Dalla valigia alla tavola, makes it as a Christmas tradition. The pillow case is used to create the sacco (sack) in which your egg mixture (with flour, parmigiano, parsley, and pepper) is cooked. This creates a loaf that you then pull out of the sacco and cut into cubes to add to the chicken broth, along with chicken meatballs.13
These eggy soups are hearty, made for many people, and usually served at holidays or celebrations. Spezzato is made for weddings and Easter. Even stracciatella - though many of the origin stories I found online linked it to Christmas - is served for this spring holiday, as is the sciusceddu in Messina.14 Many explain the link to Easter because of the egg, a symbol of rebirth and life (which is perfect for the celebration of spring, too). Further, the cracking of the egg symbolizes the empty tomb of Jesus after his resurrection.15 Medievalists and other scholars have also pointed to Lent as an explanation: it was a lean period during which it may have been prohibited to eat eggs altogether during the 40 days leading up to Easter. Therefore, eggy Easter soups became a traditional way to welcome back the “fat” time of year.16
Though Italian-Canadians and Americans may have, in large part, lost our connection to these symbols, legends, and meanings behind the traditions, the soup remains. Nancy Verde Barr’s We Called it Macaroni: An American Heritage of Southern Italian Cooking includes a recipe for “Easter soup.” No particular origin is given, it is firmly situated in the Italian-American context:
Although this soup was traditionally served at the beginning of an Easter meal, for many Italian-American families it began most any holiday meal. There are many variations [...] but it is most important that the chicken broth be strong and flavorful. Easter soup is one of the few exceptions to the Italian rule that soup and pasta are never served at the same meal since it often precedes lasagna, ravioli, or ziti at a festive occasion.17
This recipe is made with escarole, meatballs made of ground beef and milk-soaked bread, a thinly sliced hard-boiled egg, chicken broth, and grated parmigiano. The egg slices are placed at the bottom of each bowl. Beyond the Easter soup, upon emigration, Barr explains that opportunities for work in North America allowed Italians to have access to more ingredients, therefore heavier pasta, meat, and fish meals replaced the oft-eaten soups. Some of which may not even have been made with broth.18 Instead, in North America, one meal a week would be reserved for “soup night.”19 The ability to serve heavy, eggy soups with savoury meat broths on a weekly basis was part of “making it.”20
Sette cose fa la zuppa: cava fame e attuta sete; empie il ventre e netta il dente; fa dormire, fa smaltire e la guancia arrossire.
Barr writes: “Southern Italians have a saying about soup: […] Soup does seven things; it relieves your hunger, quenches your thirst, fills your stomach, cleans your teeth, makes you sleep, helps you digest, and colors your cheeks. Italians felt that way about soup because it was a mainstay of ‘la cucina povera’ diet.”21 Karima Moyer-Nocchi also writes about the significance of soup in the Italian diet, explaining:
[...] broths were revered as tonics, vital liquid extracts of healthful properties that had been carefully coaxed from solids. […] Soup went beyond being a mere sum of its parts. It was a veritable ritual akin to the sacredness of bread itself. Not only was it the essence of goodness, but the very act of amalgamating disparate, even unappealing scraps into a harmonious appetizing meal, was an economic godsend that filled the stomach while it pleased the palate.22
Soup gets you through tough times, whether it be financial or health concerns. It helps make do. It helps exceed all expectations of making do. And its roots in cucina povera still linger in the bowls we serve around our kitchen tables today. In Molise’s case, the food is “based on the cooking of shepherds and of the contadino.”23 Their work and travels along the transumanza helped shape the cuisine that then traveled across the Atlantic to Montreal, Ottawa, New York, and beyond. It traveled to my dining room table in Saint-Leonard, and here it mingles with Lipton, with the hawaiian pizza I loved as a child (don’t judge me); and it faces all the ways that authenticity is blurred in diaspora.
Because “Italian food” or “Italian cuisine” does not exist. Food is regional, local, familial. Cuisine is transformed by the food industry, for customers, for mass markets. As many have argued, in North America, “the ethnic community invented a common national cuisine that never actually existed in Italy.”24 Italian festivals and social clubs were spaces for this mingling and melding.25
And this is okay. Personally, I like to think of each cracked egg dropping into the boiling, yellow Lipton soup as an interesting way traditions live on. It is the act of resurrecting them through the constant change life brings. It doesn’t have to be a delicacy to tell a story. When I decided to write about this seemingly mundane topic, I didn’t expect to write close to 3000 words about a cup of soup.
Cass
PS: Read the footnotes because they are interesting and full of more info!
See below for monthly tarot pull, footnotes, and resource list.
Monthly Tarot Read
Each issue will include a tarot pull reflecting on the research and folklore discussed in the newsletter.
Deck used: The Pasta Tarot
How perfect that this card represents acini di pepe, a small, round pasta shape that is often used as pastina for soups! Not to mention the warmth that the scene depicted on this card emanates: a group of people playing, laying, and eating on the beach, under the sun. The image in the foreground is of two hands passing a bowl full of acini di pepe to each other. It is a card (traditionally the 10 of pentacles) and scene of abundance and family.
With the coming of spring (but the continued cold weather here in Montreal), take stock of who and what nurtures your heart and soul. Offer them thanks in your own way. This abundance is also about building foundations: reconnect with yourself, with the literal and metaphorical chicken soup of your life. And maybe drop an egg in it: read up on your family history, learn about an ancestor, ask questions to your elders, try to bring a new old tradition into your life. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be valid, or meaningful.
I did some research on the advent of instant soups and came across this 2014 press release by Campbell’s. They were the first to invent this format in the 1930s, though the idea of “instant soup” can be traced back to 18th and 19th century “portable soup” (a British invention credited to a Mrs Dubois, see example here). In 1897, Campbell’s invented condensed soup. Then, it seems, Lipton in the 1940s (though that product description was the only thing I could find with a date). Instant ramen was then invented in 1958 by Momofuku Ando.
Stracciatella from straccio, meaning rag, or stracciare, tear, because the eggs look like little torn rags in the broth.
In Soup Through the Ages: A Culinary History with Period Recipes by Victoria R. Rumble, she states that soup is one of the earliest prepared dishes in history (7).
Lucas Sin, “Any Soup Can Be Egg Drop Soup If You Want It to Be,” bon appétit, May 15, 2020. https://www.bonappetit.com/story/any-soup-can-be-egg-drop-soup.
Lucas Sin, “Any Soup Can Be Egg Drop Soup If You Want It to Be,” bon appétit, May 15, 2020. https://www.bonappetit.com/story/any-soup-can-be-egg-drop-soup.
Each of these are from particular regions or cities in the country’s mentioned. Therefore, just like the Italian context, I imagine that many sub-variations probably exist. Since I’m not writing a dissertation about egg soups, I will leave it at that for today.
“Le origini della stracciatella in brodo,” Marie Claire, December 27, 2022. https://www.marieclaire.it/food/a42346858/le-origini-della-stracciatella-in-brodo/ and Chiara Dalessio, “Stracciatella, a tale of three Italian delights,” L’Italo Americano, July 18, 2023. https://italoamericano.org/3-stracciatella/.
Historical Italian Cooking, “Medieval Zanzarelli - Egg and Cheese Soup,” Historical Italian Cooking, https://historicalitaliancooking.home.blog/english/recipes/medieval-zanzarelli-egg-and-cheese-soup/.
This and above three recipes can be found in: Accademia italiana della cucina, La cucina: The regional cooking of Italy (New York: Rizzoli, 2009).
Find the recipe here: https://sicilianfoodculture.com/recipe/sciusceddu-messinese/
This recipe can be found in A.M. Lombardi and R. Mastropaolo, La cucina molisana: Volume primo (Ripalimosani: Arti Grafiche La Regione, 1986) and is made with chickpeas, eggs, scamorza, bread, cheese, onion (but the egg is used to soak the bread, not as a “drop”): “This dish has two curiosities: the combination of dairy products with legumes, which is quite unusual, and its presence in different cultural environments. Again, the transhumance, a centuries-old channel of mass communication, probably favored the transmission of this practice” (170). Translation my own.
These recipes can be found in Cassandra Marsillo and Vee Di Gregorio, Dalla valigia alla tavola: A journey through Molisan culinary heritage, (Montreal: Federazione delle associazioni molisane del Quebec, 2023).
If you look up “Italian Easter soup,” you will especially find many variations of stracciatella.
Wikipedia, “Easter Egg,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg.
“The true origin of Easter eggs is ... the prohibited use of eggs during Lent. Indeed, Adolph Franz, the learned historian in ecclesiastical blessings of the Middle Ages, says that he has never discovered, in the sacramentaries or rituals anterior to the 10th Century, any special form for blessing the eggs.” Peter Gainsford, “Easter and paganism. Part 2,” Kiwi Hellenist: Modern myths about the ancient world, March 26, 2018. http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2018/03/easter-and-paganism-2.html. For Ancient Roman eating habits, see: Massimo Montanari, translated by Beth Archer Brombert, Italian Identity in the Kitchen, or Food and the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). For more about eggs at Easter, see: Krystal D’Costa, “Beyond Ishtar: The Tradition of Eggs at Easter,” Scientific American, March 31, 2013. https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/anthropology-in-practice/beyond-ishtar-the-tradition-of-eggs-at-easter/.
Nancy Verde Barr, We Called it Macaroni: An American Heritage of Southern Italian Cooking (New York: Knopf, 1990), 55.
When a family was really struggling financially, for example, they would just use water (Ibid., 46), or just onion broth, or even rocks, as is the case with the pesce fuiute, or fake fish, soup. From Molisan coastal villages, 3-4 rocks from the sea would be placed in a pan with olive oil before adding the other ingredients, none of which were fish. The saltiness from the rocks gave the soup its “fishiness.” Source: Accademia italiana della cucina, I (New York: Rizzoli, 2009), 170.
Barr, 45.
Although, of course, those who immigrated pre-WWII also faced difficult times in North America with the Great Depression. I found a mention of this interesting YouTube channel in a mashed article. Clara of “Great Depression Cooking” explained that the egg drop soup she demonstrated in the video was a common dish during that period. She recalled her mother browning chopped potatoes and onions with salt and pepper to form the base of the broth. Some eggs are cracked into the broth and scrambled, while one per person are left whole, to poach. This is all then served on bread, quite similarly to zuppa alla pavese, typical of Pavia, in Lombardia.
Barr, 45.
Karima Moyer-Nocchi, Chewing the Fat: An Oral History of Italian Foodways from Fascism to Dolce Vita (Perrysburg: Medea, 2015), 17.
Anna Del Conte, Gastronomy of Italy (London: Pavilion Books, 2013), 235.
Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Food in World History (New York: Routledge, 2017), 96.
Anya von Bremzen, National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of Home (New York: Penguin press, 2023), 63.
Resources
Ada Boni, The Talisman: Italian Cookbook (New York: Crown Publishers)
Accademia italiana della cucina, La cucina: The regional cooking of Italy (New York: Rizzoli, 2009
A.M. Lombardi and R. Mastropaolo, La cucina molisana: Volume primo (Ripalimosani: Arti Grafiche La Regione, 1986)
Anna Del Conte, Gastronomy of Italy (London: Pavilion Books, 2013)
Anya von Bremzen, National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of Home (New York: Penguin press, 2023)
Chiara Dalessio, “Stracciatella, a tale of three Italian delights,” L’Italo Americano, July 18, 2023. https://italoamericano.org/3-stracciatella/
Historical Italian Cooking, “Medieval Zanzarelli - Egg and Cheese Soup,” Historical Italian Cooking, https://historicalitaliancooking.home.blog/english/recipes/medieval-zanzarelli-egg-and-cheese-soup/
Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Food in World History (New York: Routledge, 2017)
Karima Moyer-Nocchi, Chewing the Fat: An Oral History of Italian Foodways from Fascism to Dolce Vita (Perrysburg: Medea, 2015)
Krystal D’Costa, “Beyond Ishtar: The Tradition of Eggs at Easter,” Scientific American, March 31, 2013. https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/anthropology-in-practice/beyond-ishtar-the-tradition-of-eggs-at-easter/
“Le origini della stracciatella in brodo,” Marie Claire, December 27, 2022. https://www.marieclaire.it/food/a42346858/le-origini-della-stracciatella-in-brodo/
Lucas Sin, “Any Soup Can Be Egg Drop Soup If You Want It to Be,” bon appétit, May 15, 2020. https://www.bonappetit.com/story/any-soup-can-be-egg-drop-soup
Mara Weinraub, “The Astronomical Success Story of Lipton Onion Soup Mix,” Food52, November 15, 2019. https://food52.com/blog/24766-history-of-french-onion-dip
Marco Gavio de Rubeis, Ancient Roman Cooking: Ingredients, Recipes, Sources (Rome: I Doni delle Muse, 2020)
Massimo Montanari, translated by Beth Archer Brombert, Italian Identity in the Kitchen, or Food and the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013)
Nancy Verde Barr, We Called it Macaroni: An American Heritage of Southern Italian Cooking (New York: Knopf, 1990)
Peter Gainsford, “Easter and paganism. Part 2,” Kiwi Hellenist: Modern myths about the ancient world, March 26, 2018. http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2018/03/easter-and-paganism-2.html
Press release, “Happy 80th Birthday Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup,” January 16, 2014. https://www.campbellsoupcompany.com/newsroom/press-releases/happy-80th-birthday-campbells-chicken-noodle-soup/
Victoria R. Rumble, Soup Through the Ages: A Culinary History with Period Recipes (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2009)