One of the most famous Victorian dishes is a hilarious lie
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
I have never heard of Brown Windsor soup until today. An article that's debunking a myth itself contains a myth.
it's totally new to me
Not necessarily. "Hancock's Half Hour" and "Goon show" episodes were sold on vinyl records at the time (and are still to be found on the big internet retailer on Vinyl, CD and MP3).
If the media were in the house, years later, kids would play them for amusement.
:)
the only time I've ever heard the Goon show or Hancock's Half Hour, has always been whilst listening to the radio (typically 2 or 4) that makes a reference to the shows and plays a few seconds clip
Within my limited field of family and friends I would say that people have heard about them, but have not really listened to them
The funniest one I remember is "The Blood Doner", which turns out was a TV episode (most were just radio).
"The Radio Ham" is also good.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blood_Donor / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEUvyaNu0uw
On the other hand, I rescued my late mother's recipe books when we cleared their house and I can offer up a recipe for "Brown Stew" if anyone's interested. Still not "Windsor" though.
Is that the Good Housekeeping recipe book by any chance? That has a number of brown things, including stew.
"SAVOURY SAUCES
"Vast as the number of individual savoury sauces may be, most of them can be divided into White (simple or rich), Brown and Egg sauces, plus a group of Miscellaneous ones such as Mint Sauce."
Though it is actually a pretty good cookery book in many ways.
If I were to point at a dish that was probably more popular in the past it would be fried eel, which you can still find in certain places in London.
BWS, never heard of it, family is British and they've not heard of it either.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_World_in_80_Days_...
A web search turns up this pre-decimalization advertisement: https://englandspuzzle.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Batche... . Just plain "Windsor soup", but dark (dare I say brown?), and so clearly not the Francatelli recipe mentioned in the article. It's also on a 1926 menu in the Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail, shown here: http://www.foodsofengland.co.uk/brownwindsorsoup.htm . Binns was a department store in Sunderland, England.
So it definitely existed, but appears to have fallen out of fashion decades ago.
1. https://www.google.com/search?q=%22brown+windsor+soup%22&biw...
At a guess, you had to be in the generation that actually watched the Goon Show.
Note though that my sample size for older people is very small due to the lack of 50's+ in my immediate vicinity (one person in their 60's and one person in their 70's).
2. debunk it
3. everybody click and complain
4. profit?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Goon_Show_of_All
It is, of course, on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF745ywyvVY
FWIW, I hadn't heard of Brown Windsor Soup till I watched the recent adaptation of Around The World in 80 Days.
Being a radio show, you could watch it with your eyes closed.
As radio shows go, it was actually very visual.
In the 1968 'Report on soups' by the British Ministry of Agriculture (https://archive.org/embed/op1268165-1001), there is a reference on page 19 to this exact soup (called 'Windsor soup', 'Brown soup' or 'Eton soup'). It even lists the a basic list of ingredients. So this means this soup indeed exists.
Now some further digging. Are there old references to either 'Windsor soup', 'Brown soup' or 'Eton soup' in non-fictional media?
The 1892 'The encyclopædia of practical cookery' does not list this soup, although it is quite sparse on soups.
The 1844 'A New System of Domestic Cookery' list a large amount of soups, none even vaguely hinting at the same name.
However, the 1906 'High-class cookery recipes' (https://archive.org/embed/b21528597) lists a 'Windsor soup' which should have a 'brown colour' as the basis. I think that should qualify as a 'brown roux' basis which at the very least lends some credence to a brown 'Windsor Soup' although I cannot verify the color myself.
Anyway, that's the result of about 15 minutes of googling. At the very least, it makes me a bit sceptical of the article.
“People don’t like it when you challenge their beliefs. … It’s so small and unimportant, you don’t bother to investigate it. It makes you wonder: how many things do we believe that if we were to look into them, we’d find they were complete nonsense?”
A guy I used to know was telling about a British children's TV show where all the characters names were actually double entendres.
It just so happened that I had recently read the fascinating story about how this wasn't true at all, despite the press writing that it was and so on and it was just a successful urban legend.
He said no it's really true, he'd seen it himself on TV. I later sent him over email the article describing the legend. Anyway he got really mad at me for just saying that and went round telling people I was an asshole for destroying this story for him. I was really surprised that someone could be so upset by that.
I can understand why he got upset though if you rained on his parade in front of other people. It was probably a pet story he enjoyed telling. Something I have also been guilty of!
On a similar note, however, a colleague tried to shock me (he thought I was more straightlaiced than I am) by asking if I'd heard Cardi B's WAP. I took great pleasure in retaliating with the song "My Girl's Pussy" from 1931 which is what you might call a great deal of entendre without very much double.
Impossible to imagine how this could go over people's heads. Says something about how narrow many people's cultural horizons were in the 1930s I guess.
According my parent's retelling of the RtH story, the humour is a result of posh people (who get to make BBC comedy) being exposed to working class while serving in WW2, although there is obviously gay subculture in there too.
> Hughes has spent years challenging the Victorian roots of brown Windsor soup—“I keep trying to correct the Wikipedia page, but I’ve given up”—and has faced considerable fury for his efforts.
Once Wikipedia decides something is a fact, it can be hard to alter it; no matter the sources you bring. If something stood there in an article for over a decade and the article is guarded by a certain type of editor, just give up.
> While commonly associated with the Victorian and Edwardian eras, the practice of calling it 'Brown Windsor' did not emerge until at least the 1920s, […]
The article is written around this vague 'it'; a soup that according to Wikipedia has Victorian origins, but wasn't called brown Windsor soup until the 1920s. If Hughes was right, than the article shouldn't treat brown Windsor soup as synonymous with 'Windsor soup', but clearly mark it as a special case with a curious history that doesn't seem to go back further than the 1920 at the earliest.
Brown Windsor soup is a hearty British soup that is said to have been popular during the Victorian and Edwardian eras.[1]
It was one of the starter dishes on the menu at the fictional Fawlty Towers
It is unclear whether this often-written-about soup is indeed Victorian, or was invented as a joke in the 1950's - perhaps conflating the well-known White Windsor Soup with the equally famous Brown Windsor Soap. There do not appear to be any references to it before about 1953.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Windsor_soup&oldi...
Edit. The current version says:
> Windsor soup or Brown Windsor soup is a British soup that was popular during the Victorian and Edwardian eras.[1][2][3] The practice of calling it 'Brown Windsor' did not emerge until at least the 1920s, and was usually associated with low-quality brown soup of uncertain ingredients. Although originally an elegant recipe among famous chefs of the 19th century, the 'Brown Windsor' variety became an institutional gruel that gained a reputation as indicative of bad English food during the mid-20th century and a later source of jokes, myths and legends.
So, given that the author of the article "tried to update it" I don't know what they were trying to update it to?
Perhaps to say something like "Brown Windsor soup appears to be a fictional foodstuff referenced in British comedies from the mid-20th Century. Some people insist it is a real foodstuff and recent recipes founded in fictional universes, such as the Harry Potter cookbook, include an actual recipe (with no evidence that it is in anyway historic)."
The quoted part you give would be like saying "Endor is a moon planet orbiting the Outer Rim planet of the same name, said to have been a forest moon a long time ago." without mentioning that its origin is [as far as evidence suggests] in fiction.
Couple of links with a little more but mostly the same as has been covered in this thread: https://www.lovefood.com/news/57860/the-curious-tale-of-brow... https://delishably.com/soup/The-Mystery-of-Brown-Windsor-Sou...
It would be interesting to see what Keith Floyd (Floyd on Britain & Ireland, By Keith Floyd, 1988 includes a recipe https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91F2K-ZRDxL... shown in the Amazon preview) has to say about this. I wonder if the BBC have any details in their archives if the recipe was in the TV series https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1720675/?? [fwiw https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03gprry seems to me to be the most likely episode if any mention it?]
"Remember when Nelson Mandela died in prison? No, neither do I"
I've never heard of brown Windsor soup, never mind been brought up believing in it.
IMO, its just a matter of multiple groups of people around the world making similar dishes and with multiple sets of definitions of what that particular dish is. And at some point, it all collided and mashed together individual histories.
Maybe it was just their version of a meme.
Actually I have never tried either, so maybe either works!
Honestly, all things considered, it's not that weird.
“Everybody in England was brought up believing in brown Windsor soup,” says Glyn Hughes, author of The Lost Foods of England. “What is really, really strange is how deep this is into the British psyche. Walk up to anyone in the street and ask them about brown Windsor soup, and they’ll say that it was terrible and horrible but everybody ate it in the Victorian era.”
Complete bollocks.