This Side of the Pond

We don’t need to worry about warm weather any more, so my thoughts have turned to the kind of comforting meal that cheers up a gray day – and what better option than soup?

While creams of chicken and tomato, noodle-based soups and the various potato-based delights we all love are shared between our nations, this made me wonder if my homeland has chosen any of our offerings as a national soup, which I could then offer up to you as something new to try.

The answer turned out to be “sort of”.

Such a thing does exist, but it is neither official nor a soup.

There’s a recipe that resides in our national psyche as representative of British cuisine, and it only seems to exist in Britain.

Except, it doesn’t.

If you ask a search engine what the national soup of the UK is, it will name something that sounds both fancy and unappetizing: Brown Windsor Soup.

This made me curious, because I’d never tried eating a concoction by this name and I don’t recall seeing it canned on a supermarket shelf, but mention of it seems to turn up anywhere there’s a sniff of the Victorian era. All of us seem to have heard of it, but none of us knows what it tastes like.

Many authors call it “Queen Victoria’s favorite,” for instance, and a modern spin appears in the unofficial cookbooks for both Downton Abbey and Harry Potter. It’s the butt of jokes in the radio comedy era that spawned Monty Python and it’s eaten in episodes of Poirot and Around the World in 80 Days.

Brown Windsor Soup is said to have been a royal invention that appeared on the menu for state banquets and trickled down to the masses, who took their cue from what the crowned few were doing.

All of this is a lie.

Queen Victoria cannot possibly have fallen in love with this dish. She never even ate it, because it didn’t yet exist.

And, in all honesty, it still doesn’t.

A scholar by the name of Glyn Hughes wanted to include Brown Windsor in his book The Lost Foods of England. He assumed this would be an easy bit of research, considering how famous it is.

Hughes figured he could flip open one of the famous cookbooks of the Victorian era and there the recipe would be – but it didn’t appear in any of them. He couldn’t find it in the British Newspaper Archives, either.

He even paid two researchers to go through a century’s worth of archives at the National Railway Museum because part of the legend is that Brown Windsor Soup was once a staple on the nation’s trains. Not a mention of it was made.

Hughes realized that Britain was suffering from some sort of “mass hallucination.”

We appear to have quite literally imagined a soup into existence.

Somehow, it became known as the disgusting food that the Victorians couldn’t get enough of. We didn’t just invent a soup, we invented a flavor for it, and it wasn’t even a flavor we thought we might like.

There were brown soups and Windsor soups, but the Victorians never combined the two. The first mention Hughes could find of Brown Windsor Soup was from a café menu once offered in a department store in the 1920s, and a couple of decades later a version was sold in a can.

This means that the only recipes in existence were based on assumptions, even a century ago. Nobody can know what was included in Brown Windsor Soup because there wasn’t any such thing.

In other words, the Brits who now eat this soup – or a version of what we think it ought to be – are doing so because we think we’ve been eating it all along.

How did we get this idea into our collective heads?

Nobody is sure. One of the more popular ideas appears to be that Queen Victoria liked to use luxury brand Brown Windsor Soap in her morning ablutions, but I doubt she ate it for breakfast.

It was, in fact, the radio shows I mentioned earlier that seem to have made Brown Windsor Soup a popular concept. It became shorthand for everything that other cultures feel is wrong with British cuisine and was used in all manner of jokes – one of Spike Milligan’s better-known skits involves the English being pelted with porridge by the Scots and firing back with cannonballs filled with soup.

You’re probably wondering by now what Brown Windsor Soup actually is, and that’s an excellent question. As it never existed in its make-believe heyday, we have only the whims of modern-day chefs to go on.

For the curious, here is one such recipe provided by Jamie Oliver:

Melt a large knob of butter in a pan over a medium heat, then add a splash of olive oil and 1 lb of diced stewing steak. Lightly brown the meat all over.

Stir in a splash of Worcestershire sauce and a tablespoon of Marmite (this is a British yeast extract paste so, if you don’t fancy ordering any in, you can substitute with half a tablespoon of miso paste. Or just leave it out – it’s not like you’re changing the recipe from the original). Turn up the heat and stir until all liquid has evaporated.

Chop a red onion, two carrots and three sticks of celery and add to the pan with a bay leaf and a sprig of rosemary. Cook over a low heat until softened.

Stir in a tablespoon of all purpose flour. Wait one minute and pour in 8.5 cups of beef broth and season well. Bring to the boil, then reduce to a simmer and add 6 oz of pearl barley.

Cook gently for an hour, then remove from the heat and fish out the rosemary sprig and bay leaf. Use a stick blender to whizz the soup for a couple of seconds to thicken it, but leave some chunks.

Finally, serve your imaginary meal with hunks of bread for dipping and pretend it’s as delicious as it would look if it actually existed.