IS IT SOUP YET?

Q: What’s red and white on the outside and grey and white on the inside?

A: Campbell’s Cream of Elephant Soup.

* * *
This was one of the jokes that circulated back around 1964-65 when I was in middle school... part of a general Elephant Joke craze that lasted several months and then quietly died out.

But Campbell’s Soup, with its distinctive red and white cans, lives on.

The Campbell Soup Company is a Past Master at the art of making condensed soups, the soups we all grew up with. Sure, we might have homemade chicken soup with noodles on those Sundays we’d visit the grandparents - add-ins like kreplach or matzohballs were holiday treats - but the weekday staple, soup wise, was, like as not, a can of Campbell’s, suitably diluted with a can of water.

There was a certain perverse delight I would experience upon seeing (and hearing) that cylindrical clot of soup slide out of the can into the waiting saucepan. Schlu-u-u-urp! I’m sure the Freudians would have had a lot to say about that.

These days, the Missus and I make our own soups from scratch, although we will occasionally allow ourselves the convenience of using a store-bought broth or stock as a base. And, being Food-Snots, we typically will not use condensed soup as an ingredient. All them recipes that use Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup? Feh. (King Ranch Chicken is a notable exception.)

But now that I’ve seen this, all that may change. Finally, a condensed soup I can really wrap my teeth around!



Bonus question: The title of this post comes from a soup advertisement. Whose? And when?

[Tip o’ th’ Elisson fedora to Zonker, who pointed me to this site... and the tasty and creative product suggestion in the comments. Yeef!]