French Culinary Expression: BE SOAKED LIKE A SOUP

58757 Views 26/02/2023 0 comments Posted By: Emmanuel Poulet-Harmel In: Blog of gourmets

The expression seems a bit odd to you: dip bread in soup, okay, but dip soup!

We used to say “soak the soup”, in the sense of pouring the broth over slices of bread, because the “soup” designated, since the Middle Ages, the slice of bread.

"  To cut soups", which would seem to us today an absurd formulation, therefore meant to cut slices of bread, and we still said in the 15th century, as Furetière specifies, "give me a soup of bread, to say a slice ".

By analogy, in the 18th century, to talk about someone wet to the bone with rain, we were able to forge the comparison "to be soaked like a soup", which, when you use it from now on, will no longer evoke for you a bowl full of broth to the brim, but a sponge soaked in bread!