Day 11 Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup

 The Campbell's soup can has got to be about the most iconic food packaging in America. I think it's really up there with the Coca-Cola bottle. Perhaps because it's changed so little in the past hundred years.

Despite the can being 25% bigger than the regular Campbells condensed soup cans, there's not much here nutritionally. Only 210 calories in the whole can!

Something about this picture, which takes up about a third of the label really bugs me. "In this Campbell's Chicken Noodle soup we begin with good, honest ingredients like lean chicken meat and egg noodles." We see some dry egg noodles in what appears to be a hand-carved wooden bowl. Just like grandma would have back on the farm. The idea being that this soup is hand-crafted from "good, honest ingredients".





The ingredients aren't dishonest, the chicken and egg noodles are definitely real but I don't remember grandma using MSG, soy protein isolate, sodium phosphate, or modified food starch in her chicken soup. I mean come on, Campbells. This is industrially produced, processed canned food. I don't need a homespun "aw shucks" story about how you begin with honest ingredients.

Anyway, enough about the packaging, it's time to make the soup. 

Cooking is easy, just dump it in a pan and add one can of water and bring to a simmer. You can also do it in the microwave, but I opted for stove top because the microwave leads to uneven heating and sometimes splattering of the soup inside the microwave.

I poured all the soup into a big bowl and gave it a minute to cool before digging in.

I ate this soup with no condiments added. Normally I would have added black pepper and Tabasco to the soup but I wanted to experience it in its purest form. The broth is satisfying with a nice substantial mouthfeel, with tons of satisfying umami. The actual chicken flavor is pretty subtle. The noodles were a bit softer than I would have liked but were short and easy to manage with a spoon. The chicken pieces were quite tender and appeared to be dark meat.

When I was a kid my mom told me that the chicken in chicken noodle soup came from hens which had become too old to lay eggs. I think this may have been true in the old days but now I imagine the tough, stringy meat from those hens finds its way into mechanically separated chicken products.

The soup is, by today's standards, quite bland. It's incredibly salty. According to the nutrition facts, I got 111% of my recommended daily value of sodium from the can. There are absolutely no spices that I could discern except the barest hint hint of onion and garlic.

But forget today's standards, what was this soup like in 1934 when it was introduced? I don't think the soup has changed much but I think America has. And not just in the sense that foreign/ethnic food was less prevalent back then but in that expectations for food were lower. My grandfather was born in 1936 and grew up in Colorado in the Great Depression.and through World War 2. He and his siblings had to steal beans from a local farmer's field to feed the family. Lunch was a potato. Not like a baked potato with chives and cheese and bacon bits and chili but a potato and nothing more. Dinner was a slice of bread with some bacon grease.

In this context, a can of Campbell's Chicken Noodle soup would have really really good. Probably a rare treat for the average family back then. It honestly makes me feel quite fortunate that today, my complaints about food are "it's not spicy enough" or "it has soy protein isolate". It could be worse.