You go first.
Allegedly, it’s safe.
EAT THE SOUP. I DARE YOU. {LINK}
Btw–this counts as cuisine.
Thermophilic bacteria generally don’t cause disease, though some pathogens have been associated with hot tubs.
I wouldn’t want to be the subject of an early case report, so you can have all the ancient soup you want.
There’s a sample of “transportable soup” in the museum attached to the USS Constitution in Boston that’s a lot older than 79 years. I don’t recall how old it is.
They made it by boiling the soup down until all the water was out of it, then breaking the resulting black solid into chunks. It could be reconstituted by throwing a piece into water and boiling it for a couple of hours. It’s basically 18th century cup-a-soup that hasn’t been ground into powder.
It’s a great idea – if you keep it dry, it’ll keep forever and can be made edible again at any time. It’ll be nutritious, although I don’t know if the vitamins will survive the heart treatments.
I’m surprised I never read about this in naval histories or historical novels.
It’s the Soup of Theseus. Or kind of like a solera system for aging. Sure, there are probably some molecules of the first soup from 75 years ago in there, but I’d wager the bulk of it is from the last week or two.
One of the, if not the largest single line expenditures for equipping the Lewis and Clark expedition 1803-1806 was 193 pounds of “portable soup” for $289.50, no small sum in those days. It was not very well liked by expedition members.
Here’s the Wikipedia article on the topic, which mentions the Lewis and Clark expedition’s expenditure (but doesn’t give the expedition’s reaction to it)
There are probably other extant pieces of Portable Soup, but the one in the Constitution Museum is the only one I know of. It looks like a piece of hardened tar with other-colored bits in it, and it doesn’t look terrifically appetizing. But I’d probably think otherwise if I was starving.
These used to be completely common. Here’s an article on them from a few years ago.
Usually perfectly safe, unless you accidentally get some one day blinding stew.
My first thought was about the many vendors in Thailand who keep their stock like this. You can be driving down a rural road and there will be an old lady sitting at a small table with a kettle of broth. Meat and vegetables are added to a bowl full as you order it. The fresh meat and veggies are cooked in a sieve placed in the broth so it contributes to the flavor. Man is it good!
The yard is usually decorated with numerous fluorescent wands in different colors. They are a staple of Thai advertising. Each wand has a single 2 or 3 foot lamp in a plastic sleeve and they have short cords at each end so they can be daisy-chained. Many elaborate designs are made.
The food court in the one mall we went to had similar vendors. Unlike an American mall with named fast food restaurants, each vendor sold one or two items at a small booth. Like an indoor night market. Many were the perpetual pot type. You bought a bunch of tokens at a booth and handed them out to each vendor when you ordered. I don’t think any meal we bought in Thailand cost more then 3 bucks and these types of single items were a dollar or so.
I have to say that the stuff in that video looks downright inviting compared to the portable soup in the museum – it’s a nice, friendly brown (and flexible), rather than a piece of blackened stuff that looks as if it would shatter if you tried to bend it.
I suspect that the provisioners who made portable soup in the 18th and 19th centuries didn’t pay attention to that “don’t use heat in the last stage, because it’ll burn and taste terrible.” They wouldn’t
t have time or patience to let it dry out on its own, which might explain why the folks on Lewis and Clark’s expedition might not have cared for it.