Good heavens! Neddie Seagoon, a character voiced by Harry Secombe on The Goon Show, exclaimed, "Issue umbrellas, the Scots are firing porridge!" The English military forces are not having it after being hit with a steaming spludge.
Major Denis Bloodnok, voiced by Peter Sellers, was in horror. They are trying to unbalance our diet.
Seagoon is angry with the Scots for their tactics and wants to make a war on nutrition.
Bloodnock says that Seagoon is not going to fire. Brown Windsor soup! Seagoon bellows.
Brown Windsor soup was a joke on The Goon Show. It was a recurring comic stand-in for everything bad about British cookery. The writer, who was born to an Irish father, had no problem skewering all aspects of British culture. The Brits weaponize the soup by pouring it into cannonballs, while Seagoon injects it into his subjects to transform them into Englishmen.
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Brown Windsor soup has become famous beyond The Goon Show. The thick meat soup is a popular dish in Victorian times, with some recipe authors going so far as to call it Queen Victoria's favorite. The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook and The Unofficial Downton Abbey Cookbook contain recipes for the dish. In the 1994 episode of Poirot, the characters eat brown Windsor soup, just as they do in Around the World in 80 days.
The Goon Show had Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan. The Radio Times and the Getty Images.
Queen Victoria never heard of brown Windsor soup. Brown Windsor soup, which is often cited as a favourite dish of the Queen, did not exist in the 19th century.
The author of The Lost Foods of England says that everyone in England believed in brown Windsor soup. This is deep in the British mindset. Ask anyone in the street about brown Windsor soup, and they will say that it was terrible, but everyone ate it in the Victorian era.
English food has a terrible reputation, which has been largely justified, according to Hughes, who started his scholarly quest to document the origins of his national cuisine. The project started with a few dishes, but evolved into a collection of more than 3,700 entries, along with three books. Hughs thought it would be a snap to look into the gruel, so he first looked at it.
Hughes thought that brown Windsor soup should be easy. I thought I would look up the famous Victorian cookbooks. There is no reference to it in any of them. He turned to the British Newspaper Archive, which had a lot of articles from the 1800s. There is still nothing. The National Railway Museum has a century's worth of archives, and Hughes paid two researchers to look at them. Rail companies don't serve hot soups on moving vehicles, so that claim seemed suspect. The soup was not featured in any railway company menu or recipe book.
He says there was no mention of brown Windsor soup in the Victorian series until the 1920s. It is really, really weird.
It is really, really weird.
Brown Windsor soup is a pretty primitive dish. Jamie Oliver's current-day recipes usually include a brown stew with beef chuck or lamb. Madeira or sherry were added to liven things up, either in the soup itself or drunk alongside to make the whole mess palatable. It is possible that 19th-century English diners ate similar brown stew even if they never referred to them by such a name.
Charles Elmé Francatelli, head chef to Queen Victoria, invented potage la Windsor, which was included in the 1846 edition of The Modern Cook. The white soup made with cream, rice, and often calves' feet was known as calf's foot la Windsor. There was also a recipe for a soup called la Windsor, which was first published in 1834 and is said to have been served to King George IV. Neither dish resembles the brown Windsor soup we know today.
Brown Windsor soap was definitely the reason for the existence of Brown Windsor soup. The soap was manufactured in Windsor and was used by Queen Victoria, Napoleon Bonaparte, and the man who would become the Prime Minister.
The Brown Windsor Soap is legendary. The Boston Public Library has a public domain.
In reference to potage la Windsor, Hughes says, "So you have Windsor soup, which is completely white." You also have brown Windsor soap. You put the two together and you get something terrible.
Brown Windsor soup is an example of life imitating art. soup became a fixture on The Goon Show and stayed there despite being reviled. It's reputation is a big reason why the traditional soup is out of favor these days. I don't think you can find it on a menu.
Even though few Brits have ever seen brown Windsor soup in the wild, many will defend its historic reputation. Hughes has spent years challenging the Victorian roots of brown Windsor soup and has faced fury for his efforts.
The soup kitchen at the Conder Street mission hall was engraved in the 19th century.
Hughes says that people get really angry when you tell them that it wasn't the famous Victorian soup. He says he has received angry emails from all over the world, including a British politician who says he remembers eating brown Windsor soup on the train. When you challenge their beliefs, people don't like it.
It's hard to get rid of theculinary myths. The Singapore Sling existed before The Raffles Hotel claimed to invent it, the legendary barman Jerry Thomas never came up with the Tom & Jerry, and Elvis preferred preserves not bananas. In the case of a humble soup, it's too insignificant to question the origin stories.
Hughes says that it is so small and unimportant that you don't bother to investigate it. It makes you wonder how many things we think are true if we were to look into them.
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