Ten Things You Didn't Know About Soup

1. The Incas worshipped a god of soup.
2. Marie-Antoinette's famous dictum should rightly be translated as 'let them eat Bouillabaisse.'
3. The authentic Sicilian recipe for tomato soup includes no tomatoes.
4. Winston Churchill famously never once ate soup as an adult, saying life was too short to do so.
5. The greatest soup tragedy in history occurred in Belgium in 1834, when 17 people died eating particularly hot asparagus soup.
6. In Germany it is still illegal according to a 14th century law to put croutons in soup. This law is believed to have been brought in to protect the German dumpling industry.
7. As Dan Brown showed in his novel The Ninth Potage, the word soup is derived from an Aramaic term meaning endless dross, and that an ancient brotherhood dedicated to protecting the secret of the perfect broth is said to exist to this day in Penge.
8. The higher slopes of Everest are now littered with more than five million empty tins of beef bouillon, piled so high in certain places that they actually reach higher than the mountain peak itself.
9. For a bet the great sportsman CB Fry once ice skated for a week on a frozen plate of clam chowder. He won the bet, but lost his frost-bitten testicles in doing so.
10. Andy Warhol wished to sue Batchelors for infringement of his soup tin design until it was pointed out that he was being a self-regarding prat again.