Oh, it’s not good table manners, but at the same time, it’s really normal.
Oh, i wouldn’t think it was bad table manners, i would just think it was weird and unappealing, like putting mustard on your fries.
I have seen that specific combo of grilled cheese being dipped into tomato soup. But that’s not the only soup and sandwich combination possible and I’ve never seen someone dunk a tuna sandwich into chicken noodle soup, for example.
Yeah, that does sound a bit strange - and it brings out an interesting distinction; the sort of sandwiches offered as a combo with soup (here anyway) do tend to be a subset that would be a dunkable combo - I wouldn’t dunk a BLT in soup, but a ham and cheese toastie works very well - it’s not too far removed from the tradition of serving cheese on toast with (or often, pre-dunked on) French onion soup.
I ought to mention here that I learned from my Nigerian friend that ‘soup’ there tends to mean something that isn’t especially liquid - because it is traditionally eaten by picking up some of it on a small handful of something such as fufu or eba (starchy/doughy staples variously made from yams, cassava, etc and known as ‘swallow’) - so for example waterleaf soup (below) looks more like what I might describe as a bowl of cooked greens, with some sauce.
And what I would normally call ‘soup’ (something liquid enough to require a spoon) is typically called ‘stew’.
I think that might be another distinction - I’ve rarely if ever encountered a specific combination offered. The menu will say something like “any soup and any half-sandwich” or possibly a list of soups and sandwiches either for a set price or sometimes there are different prices depending on exactly which soup and exactly which sandwich. Sometimes not every sandwich or every soup is available with the combo but even if a place only has a single soup on the menu they have multiple sandwiches.
Nothing better than bowl of tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich.
I can think of two soups that have “graduated” from a part of a meal to the meal, ot at least the prime focus of the meal.
- Cioppino
- Pho
Could be. At the little restaurant where I most often enjoy soup and a cheese toastie, there are different soups offered and different sandwiches (as well as other meals, cakes, etc) - and there’s nothing to stop you ordering any combination you like, but there is always a deal on the ‘soup of the day + toastie’ combo - and the toastie isn’t always the same - last time I went there is was curried parsnip soup and the toastie had mozzarella in it; the time before it was butternut squash and chipotle soup and the cheese in the sandwich was red Leicester.
I had a minor argument with my wife a couple weeks ago about ramen. To me, ramen is obviously a type of soup. She said ramen is not soup. I still don’t understand why.
Ramen (at least in the form that I’ve been served in restaurants) seems a bit like soup to me soup with noodles in it. Maybe the people who don’t think so are contrasting it with something that is formally designated a soup, or maybe its just the thing about using a spoon to eat it.
When I eat soup at home I have a few slices of warm French or Italian bread slathered in butter. Sometimes I dip. If I don’t have bread, I will have buttered saltine crackers instead. I will use the crackers as scoops in between spoonfuls. Soup and sandwich would be something I’d eat at a restaurant. Rarely will I make soup and a sandwich when eating at home.
Last night we had homemade creamy chicken wild rice soup. I didn’t have any saltines and I didn’t feel like heating up bread, so I tossed a handful of oyster crackers in my soup. That was pretty good.
My husband always crushes up saltines and throws them in his soup.
For my tastes Dinty Moore Beef Stew is treated as a soup.
Other than that it’s Campbell’s canned soups or their competitors,
most of which I have never used.
Also, broth is a favorite if no real soup is available.
Chicken noodle and your basic Tomato soup are my favorites
if Dinty Moore isn’t available.
Minestrone is among the favorite options.
There are even some soups that come in foil packages that I’ll eat.
I have waited twenty-five years for this.
A soup can be defined as a dish whose principal component is a stock (meat, fish or vegetable) or milk, the various types of stock roughly corresponding to the building blocks of the French ‘mother sauces’. Beyond that, anybody can have any personal criteria they want and I won’t argue. I think that in order to have a stew, something, usually meat, must have been stewed, that is, cooked at a low temperature for a long time immersed in liquid, and that sweet fruit concoctions are using ‘soup’ more as a descriptive metaphor that anything else, but I’m not going to fight anybody about it.
The best accompaniment for soup depends on the soup. For me, usually, it’s another bowl of soup.
Yesterday was National Grilled Cheese Day. Dinner was soup and a grilled cheese sandwich.
Did you dunk?
Soup and sandwich is a natural for me. I don’t think there’s anything regional about it. For some reason that I can’t explain, tuna salad on white with tomato soup go together extraordinarily well.
Of course!
My wife and I have four go to soups.
- Mulligatawny
- Ham and bean (and cabbage and bunch of stuff)
- Chili cheese chowder. Basically a hot (from poblamos and jalapenos) potato soup. Lot’s of cheese too. Takes a bunch of chopping. Potato soups don’t seem to freeze too well. I’m fine with it, but my wife is not (after freezing). That’s a shame because once you get into the weeds of making this, you might as well make a LOT.
- Beef barley. Another favorite. Border line stew though.
- Chili as well, but we call it chili. It’s kinda soup, the way we make it. That’s a contentious subject here on the SDMB.
These are quite hearty, and reheat very well. We will make a batch and eat it all week. A lot of folks can’t do that I guess, but we have no problem eating it every day.
We don’t generally serve it with a sandwich or salad. Soda crackers is more typical.
I made homemade tomato soup once. A bit of work. Ya have to blend it and blend it and put it through a mesh strainer to get rid of seeds. It’s not a can of Cambells that’s for sure. I really liked it, my wife was ‘Meh’. But she’s not as big of a tomato fan as I am.
I like green gazpacho soup. They used to made a good version of it at Whole Foods. They don’t any longer.