Additional context (some of which Hughes might disagree with) on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor_soup
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?]
> 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.