And Now About the Cauldron Sing (#78)

Cauldrons of potions, and their keepers, the sorcerers and witches, are a stalwart of spooky stories. The first in the 2023 Spooky Science series.

Witchy things at the Seven Sisters Ritual Apothecary, April 2023. (Photo: Bryn Robinson)

It was a dark autumn evening when I first tasted the magical elixir in an even darker kitchen in my friend’s mid-century bungalow on the city’s west side.

Unlike my other friends’ houses, there were hardly any toys strewn about; plants and books instead appeared in crevices and corners of the cozy home. After some homework, but before we nestled in her basement to teach ourselves origami - that creative art that asks one to twist and sculpt shiny paper into nigh-supernatural contortions - we sat at her kitchen table for supper.

There was some tension here for me. It was my first time playing at someone’s house on a school night, and we were relatively new friends. More so, though, I was not a daring eater, and my parents’ warning to mind my manners and eat what was put in front of me was on repeat. But as we finished math sheets, a pot on the stove began emitting wonderfully strange new aromas.

This is 1988. In my house, soup was not from a cauldron, but from a can - the type that gave Warhol such immense fame. I still shudder at the thick salty paste of Campbell’s “Cream of Mushroom”, with its’ pencil eraser fungi littered about the mixture. (It was the type of culinary horror that likely gave the quasi-sentient cordyceps a rallying cry for human annihilation in The Last of Us.)

The other can in our pantry was Campbell’s Chicken Noodle: an infamous electric yellow broth with flecks of poultry and long, overcooked noodles that became a staple in our personal apothecary (along with soda crackers, ginger ale, and daytime game shows).

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It’s funny how legends begin, isn’t it?

Something about the chemistry of mixing together powders, leaves and hunks of animal - each of which may or may not be delicious on their own, but together create a synergy of taste and texture - lends itself well to the idea that we can craft cure in our kitchens for any of the 200+ viruses that lead to a common cold. The notion of stirring pinches of this and flashes of that into a large pot makes us feel like sorcerers. That, somehow, we can control our healing trajectory and health from a condition that has still defied vaccination or pharmacological cure. Again, hard to create a single vaccine or tablet for something that has so many origins (although with that many dead viruses, I bet my wireless reception would skyrocket)¹.

However, chicken noodle soup wasn’t in any medieval witches’ cauldron; it came from ancient military physicians:

"The first recorded mention of chicken soup was somebody named Dioscorides, who was an Army surgeon general in Rome," she said. "But then later, Maimonides, who was a Jewish philosopher-scientist, said that chicken soup was a panacea for so many different things: asthma, weight gain (like bone soup is today), leprosy."
Joan Nathan, Food Historian, as interviewed on CBS Sunday Morning, March 28, 2021.

Dioscorides was an important figure in the evolution of medicine, having written De Materia Medica in 64 CE, in which he “described some one thousand remedies using approximately six hundred plants and plant products” - and, parts of poultry, although it wasn’t touted as a curative for colds then:

No, thank you. (Screenshot from Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica, translated by Osbaldeston and Wood, 2000.)

No, it was the second reference in Nathan’s quote - Moses Maimonides - who claimed chicken soup - and really, any foul fowl broth - would cure anything and everything. This includes respiratory illnesses, and in discussing cures for pneumonia, Maimonides found chicken soup to be “efficacious”. So, the leap to healing other respiratory ailments (with no doubt a helpful hand from clever marketing) is easy to imagine.

This table delights me. From Therapeutic Efficacy of Chicken Soup by Rosner, 1980.

But does it really cure a cold?

Your cold will be gone in seven days. If you don't use chicken soup, it may take a week. (Schwarcz, 2017)

No.

While an Internet search on the curative properties of chicken soups will destroy your browser history and forever condemn you to click bait from influencers who all purport to have the magic soup, it will also reveal, once the chaff is separated, that it’s all hocus pocus.

The warmth and steam from the broth can help loosen congestion, and the extra liquid can help rehydrate the body as well as thinning the pesky mucus that just wants to trap and expel viruses². But a good cup of tea or toddy will help with that, too. It also claims that the chicken contains cysteine, an amino acid that also helps with the thinning gunk.

So maybe Maimonides was onto something.

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My friend’s mom called us to the kitchen, setting before us thick slabs of homemade caraway seed bread and steaming bowls of soup.

It smelled earthy and spicy in a comforting way. And it was good. It was really good.

So good that I still - clearly - think about that soup today thirty-some years later. For, despite the spooky connotations of a bubbling cauldron, there is engrained psychological comfort baked into the experience of soup.

Certainly, it’s the effect that propelled me to message my mom’s friend for a recipe for the delicious potion that boiled away on her stove thirty-some years ago. She doesn’t know that specific one, but promises to conjure a reasonable substitute for me soon.

I bet it will still be a magical elixir.

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Last year, during Spooky Science, we looked at the mystery behind the potions in my great-grandfather’s pharmacopeia notes. He didn’t have any comments on soup, though you might still find it interesting as an adjunct to this essay":

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1. I feel like you know me by now, but if not - this is absolutely sarcasm.

2. Walter J & Cull M. 2022. Chicken Noodle Soup Really Can Help When You're Sick. Discover Magazine.