Cold soups are a particular variation on the traditional soup. Two well-known chilled soups are the Franco-American vichyssoise and the Spanish gazpacho. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the former as “A soup made with potatoes, leeks, and cream, usually served chilled”, and the latter as “A cold Spanish vegetable soup consisting of onions, cucumbers, pimentos, etc., chopped very small with bread and put into a bowl of oil, vinegar, and water”.

Many ancient cuisines developed versions of fruit soup: either fruits were added to a grain-based pottage or the soup consisted mostly of fruit flavoured with various spices. The soups were made from whatever fruit was ready for harvest locally or from dried fruit. Fruit soups remain well known in Germany and Nordic countries: although they may sometimes be served at the beginning of a meal they are sweet dishes.

Davidson instances rødgrød, also known as rote Grütze, a red berry soup popular in Denmark, other parts of Scandinavia and Germany, sitruunakeitto, a creamy lemon soup from Finland, and the Middle Eastern khoshab, made with dried fruits. Other fruits used to make sweet soups include apples, blueberries, cherries, gooseberries, rhubarb and rose-hips.

Davidson mentions a category, “sour soups”, important in northern, eastern and central Europe. Some have a fermented beer base or use Sauerkraut, others are soured with vinegar, pickled beetroot, lemon or yoghurt. Examples include sinigang, chorba, a meat and vegetable soup found in many countries of eastern Europe, north Africa and Asia, and sop ikan pedas, a fish soup from Indonesia.

Żurek, from Poland, is a sour bread soup based not on meat or vegetable stock but on fermented cereal such as rye. According to a Polish cookery book, “it is always sour, salty, and creamy at the same time”. Cold soups are a particular variation on the traditional soup. Two well-known chilled soups are the Franco-American vichyssoise and the Spanish gazpacho.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the former as “A soup made with potatoes, leeks, and cream, usually served chilled”, and the latter as “A cold Spanish vegetable soup consisting of onions, cucumbers, pimentos, etc., chopped very small with bread and put into a bowl of oil, vinegar, and water”. Many ancient cuisines developed versions of fruit soup: either fruits were added to a grain-based pottage or the soup consisted mostly of fruit flavoured with various spices.

The soups were made from whatever fruit was ready for harvest locally or from dried fruit. Fruit soups remain well known in Germany and Nordic countries: although they may sometimes be served at the beginning of a meal they are sweet dishes. Davidson instances rødgrød, also known as rote Grütze, a red berry soup popular in Denmark, other parts of Scandinavia and Germany, sitruunakeitto, a creamy lemon soup from Finland, and the Middle Eastern khoshab, made with dried fruits.

Other fruits used to make sweet soups include apples, blueberries, cherries, gooseberries, rhubarb and rose-hips. Davidson mentions a category, “sour soups”, important in northern, eastern and central Europe. Some have a fermented beer base or use Sauerkraut, others are soured with vinegar, pickled beetroot, lemon or yoghurt. Examples include sinigang, chorba, a meat and vegetable soup found in many countries of eastern Europe, north Africa and Asia, and sop ikan pedas, a fish soup from Indonesia.

Żurek, from Poland, is a sour bread soup based not on meat or vegetable stock but on fermented cereal such as rye. According to a Polish cookery book, “it is always sour, salty, and creamy at the same time”. Soups and sops are frequently encountered in literature. In the King James Bible, Jesus identifies his forthcoming betrayer: “‘He it is, to whom I shall give a sop, when I have dipped it’.

And when he had dipped the sop, he gave it to Judas.” Stone Soup, an old folk tale, tells of soup produced by travellers who have no food and promise to feed the inhabitants of a village who contribute what they have to a cauldron which at first contains only a stone but is quickly added to by the villagers, making a tasty soup for everyone. The figurative use of “milksop”– literally bread dipped in milk– to mean a feeble, timid or ineffectual person is found in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare’s Richard III.

In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mr Bingley is kept waiting to announce his forthcoming ball until his cook has made enough white soup, a soup containing veal stock and almonds, much favoured for dances at the time. One of Lewis Carroll’s best-known characters, the Mock Turtle, who owes his name to the eponymous soup, sings a song that begins “Beautiful Soup, so rich and green/ Waiting in a hot tureen!”

In Isak Dinesen’s 1958 story “Babette’s Feast”, turtle soup is the first course of a magnificent dinner. Soup is frequently mentioned in films and on television. Though the foodstuff plays no part in the action, Duck Soup is used as the title of a 1927 film by Laurel and Hardy and a 1933 film by the Marx Brothers. In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1972 film Frenzy, Mrs Oxford serves her nonplussed husband a soup containing “smelts, ling, conger eel, John Dory, pilchards and frogfish”.

In the 1990s a character dubbed “the Soup Nazi” appeared in Seinfeld, an American television comedy series: his magnificent soup-making was offset by his bullying manner. Tortilla Soup is a 2001 film comedy about a retired restaurateur and his family’s love of food.