INTRODUCTION

Nourishing Broth: Folklore and History

images For most people in the world, soup serves as a humble economy food crafted from leftover bones, shells, wilted vegetable scraps, and whatever else is available, according to the frugal principle of “waste not, want not.” Wealthier households use whole chickens, fish, and hunks of lamb, beef, or pork to make the very best stock, while the poor often rely on carcasses and scraps from butchering.

Nourishing broth dates back to the Stone Age, a time when people didn’t even have pots to cook in. The first soups were “stone soups,” in which hot stones from nearby fires were added to the abdominal pouches of butchered animals in order to simmer up mixtures of meat, fat, bones, herbs, wild grains, and water. Shells of turtles or crustaceans may have supplied the first rigid pots. In Asia, bamboo tubes sealed at the ends with clay provided usable containers that could hold both food and water. Native Americans boiled bones in water by putting hot rocks into baskets lined with clay or pitch. It would take durable, heat-conducting containers, however, before soup could become a permanent fixture on the hearth.

The first earthenware pots were fired at low temperatures in pit fires or open bonfires. Crude, hand-formed, and undecorated, they date back to 22,000 years ago in China and about 12,000 years ago elsewhere. Metal pots forged of bronze appeared in the fourth millennium BCE, followed by pots made of iron and other metals. Among Europeans, Greeks used metal pots first, and soup apparently was popular there. In his satire The Frogs, playwright Aristophanes had Dionysus ask Heracles if he’d “ever felt a sudden urge for soup?” And our hero replied, “Soup? Ten thousand times so far.” That idea has never failed to resonate, and soup advertisements still speak to our desire for deep nourishment, strength, power, and invincibility.

Until the modern era, most households kept a cauldron simmering over the fire or a stockpot on a stove’s back burner. People regularly ate from it and continually added whatever ingredients became available, making long-cooked soups and stews the original “fast food.” This practice has gone on just about forever, everywhere on the planet, and in every conceivable economic or political situation as long as people have had fuel for the hearth or stove. No food is as universally appreciated as soup.

While broth-making techniques and ingredients are similar everywhere, soup styles change with culinary fashion. What has remained constant is the use of soups and “meat teas” for health and healing. Chicken soup, of course, enjoys almost mystical status in Jewish culture and is known as “Jewish penicillin.” The Jewish philosopher and physician Moses Maimonides gave it his stamp of approval in the twelfth century, having borrowed much from Galen, the second-century Greek philosopher, physician, and pathologist, and Hippocrates, who practiced even earlier, in the fourth century BC. While most people think the health claims for soup are the stuff of legend, we will show that these claims have a solid scientific basis. In short, chicken soup can do far more for us than moisten the gullet, steam out our sinuses, whet the appetite, and add the healing power of love.

Its reputation as Jewish penicillin notwithstanding, Asians actually consume the most chicken soup today. Inhabitants of Japan, Korea, China, and other Asian countries revere it for its preventive powers as well as its curative powers. According to Martin Yan, the Chinese-born, Hong Kong–American food writer and host of Yan Can Cook, this is “not a case of pure faith.” Rather, Asians routinely enhance broth’s healing power by adding “medicinal herbs and roots to… daily thirst-quenching soups to make them into elixirs at our dinner tables.” Whenever Yan feels “worn down and haggard,” he says, he remembers his “mother’s words of wisdom at the dinner table, ‘Drink your soup.’ ” Ever wonder why you can’t purchase chicken feet in American supermarkets? It’s because virtually all the feet from American industrial poultry production are shipped to China, where they go into the pot to make soup.

How much of soup’s healing power should be credited to the love that goes into preparing homemade soups for family members? How much might be due to a nurturing lifestyle that includes sitting down for regular meals? These factors are too subjective to measure, but common sense suggests they have nothing but positive effects on health and longevity. In addition, anecdotal reports abound on the power of broth to relieve headaches, calm the mind, chase butterflies from the stomach, improve focus, and gain energy.

In her 1998 book A Soothing Broth: Tonics, Custards, Soups and Other Cure-Alls for Colds, Coughs, Upset Tummies, and Out-of-Sorts Days, Pat Willard notes old recipes for invalids almost always came with encouraging words like “This will cure for sure” or “In my experience, this has always proven beneficial.” Invalid recipes in old cookbooks range from simple but strengthening beef teas to savory custards made with eggs, salt, pepper, and beef to choices of “restorative” or “stimulating” meat jellies. Many of the writers suggested adding unflavored gelatin to enhance whatever foods or drinks might otherwise appeal to the convalescent. In her 1859 book Notes on Nursing, Florence Nightingale emphasized the importance of “easy digestibility” and said, “Remember that sick cookery should do half the work of your poor patient’s weak digestion.” No food improves digestion better than broth.

Portable Soup

Broth would seem to be the least portable of foods, but “portable soup” dates back to the ninth and tenth centuries when Magyar warriors overran Europe. A fourteenth-century chronicle explains how they boiled beef until it fell apart, chopped it up, and dried it so it could be easily transported on horseback. To have broth for dinner, the men simply added hot water. In all probability, our ancestors developed portable soups all over the world in much the same way. Native Americans, for example, most likely made soup from powdered pemmican. Some portable soups, of course, were made of powdered peas, rye, and other grains, legumes, and vegetables, but the most nutritious included meat and/or gelatin.

In early seventeenth-century England, Sir Hugh Plat came up with instructions for a “drie gell… in pieces like mouth glew” in Victuall for Warz. It was made from “neat feete & legge of beeff… boiled to a great stiffness.” In 1743 Lady’s Companion described how “to make a veal glue or cake soup to be carried in the pocket.” The recipe involved cooking a gelatinous broth, then boiling it down until it was so concentrated it could be laid out on pieces of fabric. It was then turned until hardened, dry, and stiff enough to be “carried in the Pocket without inconvenience.” Many other cookbooks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries described how to prepare what was known as “veal glew,” “cake soup,” “cake gravey,” “broth cakes,” “solid soop,” “portmanteau pottage,” “pocket soup,” “carry soup,” and “soop always in readiness.” Eliza Leslie, in her Directions for Cookery of 1837, advised, “If you have any friends going the overland journey to the Pacific, a box of portable soup may be the most useful present to them.”

William Byrd II (1674–1744), founder of Richmond, Virginia, advised making portable soup with meat, bones, vegetables, and anchovies boiled down to a viscous mass and then dried in the sun: “Dissolve a piece of portable soup in water and a bason of good broth can be had in a few minutes.” Scottish poet Robert Burns describes hunters carrying portable soup in their packs.

To successfully make portable soup, cookbook writers were clear: It was necessary to fill the stockpot with plenty of cartilage and connective tissue, which breaks down into gelatin. Without gelatin, there was no way the soup would harden.

Portable soups served travelers as well as the military. British ship captain and maritime fur trader Nathaniel Portlock described the use of portable soups on his expeditions in the 1780s. Captain Cook endorsed them because they “enable us to make several nourishing and wholesome messes and was the means of making the people eat a greater quantity of vegetables than they would otherwise have done.” Apparently, the sailors didn’t much like the soup, however, and Cook reportedly flogged men who refused to eat it.

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark took portable soup on the Corps of Discovery Expedition of 1804–1806, and considered it so essential they went over budget to pay $189.50 for 193 pounds of dried soup packed in thirty-two tin canisters—like ones used for storing gunpowder, not cans as we think of them today. Lewis and Clark spent more on soup than on instruments, arms, or ammunition. But as their journals made clear, no one much appreciated the dried soup, though it sustained them when there was “nothing else to eat.”

Portable broth became commercially viable with Justus von Liebig (1803–1873), the German chemist known today as the “father of the fertilizer industry.” In 1840 von Liebig developed a portable “beef extract” to feed the “craving multitudes” who desired but could not afford real meat. The only problem was the manufacturing process took thirty kilograms of meat to produce one kilogram of extract! Large-scale production became possible when he learned he could obtain cheap beef from the carcasses of cattle raised for their hides in Uruguay. At the time, the canning and freezing of meat was not yet the norm. Von Liebig’s beef extract nourished Henry Morton Stanley on his adventure through Africa in search of Dr. David Livingstone; went along with the polar explorers Nansen, Amundsen, Shackleton, and Scott; and fed Allied soldiers during World War I. Marketed to housewives it became Oxo. Similarly, John Lawson Johnston developed “Johnston’s Fluid Beef” in 1871, later marketed as Bovril. It, too, served soldiers, sailors, explorers, and adventurers in need of healthy but portable soups. Sadly, these and similar bouillon-type products have devolved from fairly “real foods” into meatlike products that rely on MSG, artificial flavorings, and other additives for their savoriness.

Soup and Gelatin

The development of “portable soups” and meat extracts coincided with the growth of the gelatin industry. Gelatin is the jiggly denatured collagen that shows up when properly made bone broths, soups, and stews are refrigerated. In 1679, Denis Papin (1657–1712), a physicist entranced with the potential of steam pressure and steam engines, invented a pressure cooker–like contraption called the Digester of Bones. His idea was to boil down bones into a gelatin that could be used to thicken sauces or eaten directly as a jelly. He thought it would save money for poor people who needed to extract nutrition from bones but couldn’t afford the fuel needed for long-term cooking. The contraption was too expensive, however, for all but the rich.

Papin served foods prepared in his digester for a number of learned men in London on April 12, 1682, greatly impressing a diarist named John Evelyn: “I went this afternoon with several of the Royal Society to a supper which was all dressed, both fish and flesh, in Monsieur Papin’s digestors, by which the hardest bones of beef itself, and mutton, were made as soft as cheese, without water or other liquor, and with less than eight ounces of coals, producing an incredible quantity of gravy; and for close of all, a jelly made of the bones of beef, the best for clearness and good relish, and the most delicious that I had ever seen or tasted.”

Although Papin’s work with digesters never took off, the interest in gelatin continued, reaching its zenith in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it was widely perceived as the ultimate solution to world hunger, malnutrition, war rations, and rescue and relief efforts. Though not a complete protein, researchers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found that gelatin vastly improved the nutritional value of plant-based diets. It increases the protein availability of wheat, oats, and barley, though not of corn, and vastly improves the digestibility of meat and beans. This seemed a viable long-term solution for third-world people subsisting on grains and legumes and a short-term help for food banks and other rescue and relief efforts. Today it’s still a useful dietary adjunct when genuine gelatin-rich broth is not available.

Knox Gelatin

Charles Knox developed the world’s first pregranulated gelatin in 1890 after watching his wife, Rose, suffer through the labor-intensive process of making gelatin at home. A flamboyant man known as the “Napoleon of Advertising,” he promoted his gelatin products with a motorized balloon named “Gelatine,” a racehorse renamed “Gelatine King,” and other events that made headlines. After his death in 1908, Rose took over and dropped the stunts in favor of outreach campaigns that educated women on the health benefits of gelatin and showed them how to cook with it in the kitchen. Rose Knox ran the company for more than forty years until her death at age ninety-three in 1950, and was widely revered as a savvy businesswoman. Great Lakes Gelatin, formerly Grayslake Gelatin, also thrived during those years and today offers gelatin and collagen hydrolysate products from grass-fed beef, a qualitative difference over today’s Knox products, which over the years came to be manufactured using commercial factory-farmed meats.

During the heyday of gelatin, researchers and clinicians also explored the myriad ways gelatin could improve health and reverse disease. Indeed, gelatin research caught the interest of many top scientists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We’ll discuss their many findings in part 2.

The Scientific Validation of Traditional Wisdom

Folk wisdom throughout the world values broth for its healing powers, and we have found confirmation of these traditional beliefs in hundreds of nineteenth- and early twentieth–century studies on gelatin, and in thousands of modern investigations into glycine, cartilage, glucosamine, and other components found abundantly in broth. Even so, most people think of chicken soup as nothing more than a warm and fuzzy, soul-soothing comfort food and home remedy. Our ancestors may have sworn by it, but modern science tends to dismiss the healing stories as anecdotal evidence or old wives’ tales.

While it would be great to have scores of studies proving the efficacy of bone broth itself, the truth is we don’t have many. Science today follows the money, and unless something can be pilled, powdered, and patented, it’s not likely to be investigated. Accordingly, much of our evidence focuses on the various fractional components of broth. We will then explore broth’s role for the prevention—and possibly even the cure—of diseases like osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma, psoriasis, cancer, colitis, and other digestive disorders and its use in antiaging and sports medicine. Finally, we’ll present a range of recipes, from simple to complex, which allow you to incorporate homemade broth into your diet on a frequent basis.

Science and tradition tell us that bone broth is nourishing. Very nourishing. How nourishing will vary from batch to batch depending upon the diet and lifestyle of the animal, bird, or fish, its age and overall health, how it’s processed, your cooking methods, and your choice of other vegetables, herbs, and other ingredients.

The nutritional profile will change depending on the types and proportions of bones, joints, tendons, ligaments, skin, and muscles. Veal bones from calves, for example, have more collagen and cartilage than bones from grown cows. Knucklebones, being joints, are higher in cartilage than shank bones from legs. Lamb and beef shanks contain rich treasure troves of bone marrow, while poultry bones, being lighter, thinner, and mostly hollow, have less. Fish heads and tiny dried whole fish offer the rich stores of iodine for healthy thyroid function.

The body’s ability to repair connective tissue such as bone, tendon, ligament, cartilage, skin, hair, and nails diminishes with age and ill health. Bone broth, with its rich dissolves of collagen, cartilage, bone, and marrow, gives the body “the right stuff” to rebuild and rejuvenate. These components also include vitamins and minerals, the conditionally essential amino acids glycine, proline, and glutamine, and healing “essential” sugars known as proteoglycans.

According to the principle of “like feeds like,” broth can give our bones strength and flexibility, our joints cushion and resilience, and our skin a youthful plumpness. What’s more, the abundance of collagen in all types of bone broth supports heart health through strong and supple arteries, our vision with healthy corneas, digestion through gut healing, and overall disease prevention via immune system modulation. As we shall see, broth even contributes to emotional stability and a positive mental attitude.

Daily requirements for collagen and other components of broth vary from person to person; they increase with disease, physical activity, exercise, stress, and other factors. Brittle hair and nails, underdeveloped musculature, premature skin aging, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, gut disorders, and autoimmune disease are sure signs of deficiencies in collagen and other nutrients, which can be remedied with the help of genuine old-fashioned bone broth. Although dietary supplements are always an option, there’s a synergy in broth that simmers with a healing power far greater than the sum of its parts.

INTRODUCTION

Nourishing Broth: Folklore and History

Portable Soup

Campbell’s Soup: “M’m! M’m! Good” to MSG

Soup and Gelatin

Knox Gelatin

The Scientific Validation of Traditional Wisdom