Condensed soup..?

Hello.

Apparently, Dr. John T. Dorrance, a chemist with the Campbell Soup Company, invented condensed soup in 1897. I hadn't heard of this, though, until yesterday lunchtime.

It was lunchtime. I had a sandwich. But something was missing. To the cupboard. "What a perfect size for a tin of soup," I thought. "It couldn't be more appropriate." So I opened it up, turned it over and stared in bewilderment at the cylinder of red jelly that slurped out into the pan. At this point, I probably should have gone back to the tin and read the instructions on the side, but that wasn't about to happen. I assumed that Canadian soup was just fundamentally different to soup in the UK and turned the heat on the stove higher than I normally would for soup, on the grounds that it had more work to do making what was in the pan actually look like soup.

It's soup, Jim, but not as we know it.

It took a good five minutes of making the hot tomato jelly bubble in the pan before I gave up and fished the empty soup tin out of the rubbish bin. Well, of course you know how condensed soup works. I had failed to add the crucial ingredient, water. Things resolved themselves fairly quickly after that and I ended up with about three times as much soup as I needed but, on the plus side, I don't need to uncondense my lunch today.