Book excerpt: As cooking advanced from simply placing wild grains, seeds, or meat in or near a fire to following some vague notion of food as a pleasing experience, soup--the world's first prepared dish--became the unpretentious comfort food for all of civilization. This book provides a comprehensive and worldwide culinary history of soup from ancient times. Appendices detail vegetables and herbs used in centuries-old soup traditions and offer dozens of recipes from the medieval era through World War II.