Things improved, at least in the UK, with the arrival of migrants from Northern France in the fourth millennium BC. Au fait with the ways of farming, they brought not only the basic ingredients for early soup (cultivated wheat and barley plus sheep and goats), but also pottery know-how, spelling the end of the old [heated] stone technique. This made boiling possible, and with it the release of starch from cereals into the liquid, bringing about the all important "soupy" texture.

Not all iron age soup recipes were any great shakes by modern standards. Although residues clinging to pots found in a lake village in Switzerland indicate a fairly appetizing stew of raspberry, strawberry, elderberry, wheat, nuts and fish, the soup found in the stomach of Denmark's Tolland Man, found in a bog in the '50s, has translated less effectively to the modern palate. Indeed when it was reconstituted for a BBC documentary in 1954, the two presenters who tried it almost brought it straight back up...

...[Back in Britain], the range of ingredients available for the soup pot was vastly expanded by the arrival of goodies brought by the invading Romans in the second century AD: leeks, onions, garden carrots, garlic, fennel, mint, thyme, parsley and coriander to name but a few. Roman soups could be quite complicated affairs. Perhaps the oldest surviving soup recipe in the world appears in Apicus' fourth century cook book, based on the notes of a cook who had died three centuries earlier. The soup in question is Pultes Iulianae, or Julian Pottage, and the recipe is as follows:

First prepare a wheat gruel by boiling up some pre-soaked wheat with water and a little olive oil, and stir vigorously to thicken. Then pound up half a pound of minced meat in a mortar, with two brains, some pepper, lovage and fennelseed, and add wine and liquamen (fermented fish sauce, a little like modern South East Asian versions). Cook the mixture in a metal vessel, add some stock, and add the result to the wheat gruel. Voila!..

Andrew Boorde, writing in 1598, describes something nearer the modern version of soup, which he claimed was eaten throughout England: "Pottage is made of the lyquor in whych flessche is sodden in, with puttyng to chopped herbs and oatmeal and salt". The appearance of meat in this description is an indication of the growth of prosperity during the Tudor and Elizabethan periods.

...The [18th] century saw two momentous developments. The first was the invention of the first primitive stock cubes, like the "portable soup" Captain Cook took with him on his round the world voyage of 1772. Made by evaporating clarified broth until it reached the consistency of glue, this proto-Bovril could be kept for years.

Still more important, particularly from the Soup Works point of view, was the opening of Monsieur Boulanger's soup shop in Paris in 1765. This august establishment was nothing less than the world's first restaurant, and it only sold soup. The name derived from a sign hanging above the door which read "Boulanger vends les restaurants magiques" ("Boulanger sells magic restoratives"). As they say, what goes around comes around . . .

..[.In the U.S.] in the mid 1980s, Al's Soup Kitchen International opened for business in midtown Manhattan , selling delicious fresh soups to ever growing queues of hungry office workers. A kind of soupy Basil Fawlty, Al quickly became a living tourist attraction on account of his legendarily stroppy approach to his customers. He also made soup to die for.

Eventually, he reached the attention of the makers of the comedy series Seinfeld, mandatory watching for New Yorkers, who parodied him in an episode called The Soup Nazi. Suddenly, soup outlets started springing up everywhere Daily Soup, Hale and Hearty, Mr Soup and the slightly suspiciously named Soup Nutsy.