Mything Recipe

     Brown Windsor Soup has been described as a British soup, thick, dark and meaty and often served with sherry.  It has been called "the very soup reported to have built the British Empire."  A Victorian favorite starter, it was quite popular during that era of history.

     But wait!  There is no record of it in any cookbooks of that time.  In fact, the first reference of Brown Windsor Soup appears in the 1953 movie The Captain's Paradise when Alec Guinness in his best sneery and condescending voice says, "I can thoroughly recommend the Brown Windsor Soup!"

     The best conjecture on the topic is that the Brown Windsor Soup is a parody on a soup made with rice that was served to royalty, White Windsor Soup.  Thus the brown version is mythical and emblematic of horrid English cooking and damp hotels.  It continues to enjoy a terrible reputation and has become shorthand for awful food, a staple of restaurant menus of British railways, "thick and stodgy, hated by all and made directly from the sewage outflow of Windsor Castle."  The very inference that the soup would be served on a moving train makes it suspect.

     And while you cannot find the recipe in traditional publishings of the era, it can be found in The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook and also in The Downton Abby Cookbook.  That should secure it's place in literary history anyway.