Alphabet soup
The letter soup is a noodle soup with letter noodles as an insert. Small pieces of carrots and various spices are often added to the tray . Letter noodles are up to one centimeter in size and are shaped like the letters A – Z and, more rarely, the numbers 0–9 or the @ sign. Alphabet noodles and alphabet soup have been around in the United States since at least 1867 , and in Germany since 1884 at the latest. Letter noodles are usually sold as a soup, while letter soups are packaged or canned.
history
In 1867, the alphabetical soup was touted as a "novelty" in five US newspapers:
- “The latest culinary novelty is alphabetical soup. The usual cylindrical and star-shaped macaroni particles, which previously formed the solid constituents of our soup broth, have been replaced by letters from the alphabet. These pasta letters keep their shape even after cooking. "
In a price list from the company CH Knorr from October 1884, under the heading “Egg batter goods”, “Egg alphabet, asterisks, numbers, lentils” were listed. Knorr obtained this pasta from the first German egg pasta factory JF Schüle in Plüderhausen , which was founded in 1863 by the baker Jakob Friedrich Schüle.
Letter noodles are now available in stores as a soup. Letter soups are available in dry form as sachet soups and in liquid form as canned foods. The bag soups were mainly introduced in Germany by Maggi and Knorr , and canned goods in the United States by the Campbell Soup Company and the HJ Heinz Company , which sold their soup under the name "Alphabetti Spaghetti".
The shape reservoir of the letter noodles includes the 26 capital letters of the Latin alphabet and sometimes the numbers 0–9, but usually not national special letters such as umlauts or letters with diacritical marks (apart from individual art projects).
Alphabet agencies
In the wake of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policy, a myriad of government offices arose in the United States from 1933 onwards, which are abbreviated with 3–5 letter acronyms , for example WPA = Works Progress Administration. The resulting jumble of office abbreviations was derisively referred to as alphabet soup ( alphabet soup ).
literature
- Hagen Drasdo: 10,000 years of soup, 150 years of Knorr: on the history of soup [1838–1988]. Exhibition for the 150th anniversary of the Knorr company from October 11 to December 18, 1988. Heilbronn: Maizena, 1988, pages 44, 45.
- Phil Edwards: Alphabet soup is 150 years old. This is how we started spelling with our food, 2014, online .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Baton Rouge Tri-Weekly Gazette & Comet, April 11, 1867 .
- ↑ #Drasdo 1988 , page 44.
- ^ Telephone information from Annette Geisler, Heilbronn City Archives, March 2, 2017.