What is a soup? The Sicilian soup system

Abstract

This work proposes the analysis of one of the most popular dishes, and at the same time the most difficult to place in Sicilian gastronomy, the "soup". The dish represents, both from a semiotic and lexical point of view, and from a historical point of view, a specificity of Italian cuisine that does not seem to have analogues, except in culturally neighboring food systems such as the Provençal one. The word soup indicates, at the same time, a single dish and a family of different preparations, whose elements of affinity are not always clear. It is difficult to identify a stable form of the soup, both in terms of food expression and in terms of discursive and narrative content. The common divergence between pasta soups and dry pasta is still not completely generalizable. As we will see, based on a corpus of mainly Sicilian cookbooks, it is however possible to trace some "model" recipes - such as the typical "soup with tenerumi" - that we can place at the center of a hypothetical "soup system" due to some expressive traits, such as textures, and narrative traits, such as the management of the same through culinary narrative motifs, more recurrent than others among the various soups examined.