“A nice little soup for a nice little face”
is a colloquial expression from Menorca
Menorca has the third-largest harbour in the world
and supplied the Royal Navy with portable soup
A soup is a collection of ingredients easily portable
until combined with liquid to form a broth
Scotch Broth, Mulligatawny, Phở and Minestrone
soups to take you around the world
To each their own world of culinary tradition
ingredients, flavours and cooking methods
Methods passed down the generations
soup is the starter or can be the main dish
And who the heck knows what they mean in Menorca
by “A nice little soup for a nice little face…”
© Andrew Wilson, 2023
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, merrildsmith in Poetics has been cooking up Soup as a prompt…
Excellent, Andrew! I really enjoyed this one 🙂
~David
Thanks David – stay safe…
A great poem, Andrew. I love the way you took us through the process of different kinds of soup and brought us back to your opening line.
It must have been a line parents used to get their sweet children to eat soup!
Thanks Dwight – I think you are probably right!
What a great saying, Andrew, “A nice little soup for a nice little face”! I suppose it means a different soup to suit different peoples’ tastes and any number of occasions – as you say in your poem, soups take you around the world. I have a soup bible that does the same thing.
I bought an Insta-Pot – the latest incarnation of the pressure cooker so I am hoping to get back to more soups this winter…
Let me know how you like it! I never use mine.😫
My parents used pressure cookers all the time and I had one for many years too. The new incarnation is easy to use because it has digital time settings and does everything automatically and in the quest for cheaper (energywise) solutions, I recommend it…
Soup is common to most everywhere, and travels and colonization did spread food cultures (as well as less savory things, of course). Perhaps the saying has lost something in translation, but I think perhaps it is as Kim says, a soup to suit the individual eating it. Thank you!
Thank you Merril – it was a fun poem on a favourite subject…
This is absolutely stellar writing 😀 I so adore this poem!!
And what is your favourite soup Sanaa?
I love all the faces soup can take 🙂
Oh yes Björn! there are all those classic flavours and then there are the pot-luck concoctions we make…
Who knows indeed?! But hurray for every variety of flavorful soups! Enjoyed the culinary trip, Andrew.
Thanks Dora!
The end made me chuckle.
A fun poem, Andrew!
Thanks Sara!