20 of the world's best soups

If a steaming bowl of soup strikes you as the ultimate in old-fashioned comfort, you've got plenty of company.

Soup is one of the world's oldest and most universal foods, said Janet Clarkson, author of the book "Soup: A Global History."

"Every culture has some kind of soup," she said. "It's got very ancient roots." Early people simmered it in everything from turtle shells to lengths of bamboo, she writes in the book, turning out metal soup pots starting in the Bronze Age.

Boiling food made it possible to subsist on stable grains, with herbs and other ingredients added for nourishment or medicinal purposes.

Each time you deliver a pot of hearty soup (with perhaps a side of bread) to a friend with the sniffles, Clarkson said you're in fact carrying on an age-old tradition. "Separating food and medicine - that's not how ancient people thought of it," she said. "I think in every country in the world, historically, some soups were seen as restorative."

That's true no matter what you call it. Today, soup leans brothy while stews are more substantial, but the world's spoonable foods have never fit neatly into the two English-language categories.

While Clarkson dove into centuries of etymology to trace the history of soup, potage and broth, she settled on a generously broad take. "Just some stuff cooked in water," she wrote, "with the flavored water becoming a crucial part of the dish."