A stock made from the bird's bones would have been the soup base, with pieces of the flesh and croutons in the velvety, flour-thickened soup.
Our noontime trays included a bowl of miso-thickened soup, a salad of shredded burdock root, and a small dessert served with delicate green tea.
A similar shrimp and okra gumbo gets more traditional treatment at Bayou, in Harlem, with rounds of okra and shrimp bathed in rich brown roux-thickened soup.
I wanted another week to see the ruins at El Tajín, to taste the tamales and green masa-thickened soups of northern Veracruz and the Caribbean dishes of Los Tuxtlas.
Wine vinegar and garlic add zip to many mainstays of traditional Portuguese cookery, the sturdy stews and bread-thickened soups, budget-friendly, belly-filling dishes for hunkering down and seeing out tough times.
Papa al pomodoro, a bread-thickened tomato soup (or tomato-thinned bread soup), is soothing and, in summer, when it is offered, flavorful.
And galangal and lime juice, a combination thought to have medicinal properties, enlivened smooth, coconut-thickened chicken soup (tom kha gai).
A $7.50 order gets you a bowl of the rustic potato- and cassava-thickened corn and short rib soup called sancocho first.
This is just the place for your squid and convolvulus dinner, or a plate of koay teow th'ng, a noodle soup with fish balls, thickened with pig's blood, which you'll be eating in neon-washed semi-darkness, with baldly staring Malaysian grandmas and (bizarrely) banging acid house music for company.
Once upon a time (say, as recently as the 1960s and early 1970s), "Chinese food" in America meant "Chinese-American" food, that whole cornstarch-thickened universe of chow mein, egg drop soup, egg rolls, spare ribs, and shrimp with lobster sauce.
