When did people stop being ok with soup just being itself?

Lutoslawski — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:27:42 -0800

When, why and where did people start putting crackers in their soup? Oyster crackers, saltines, and more exotic varieties of crackers are now ubiquitous and 'traditional' companions to a bowl of soup at diners everywhere. Why did this start? Where? When? Was there some sort of culinary evolution - like people used to put bread crumbs in their stew and now we have this oyster cracker skeuomorph? Answers or directions to good resources regarding the history of crackers and soup are very welcome.

Got any skeuomorphs?

TurkeyMustard — Sat, 06 May 2006 12:52:25 -0800

What are some things that retain useless or vestigal features of earlier versions of the technology? These are usually called skeuomorphs (sometimes spelled "skiamorphs," though not often). This concept is most common in design and architecture, but I am especially interested in words that are skeuomorphic.

Examples are:

—Wood grain on radios, lawn chair arms, and automobiles.

—Lights shaped like candles.

—"Dialing" a phone, now doubly skeuomorphic in the age of VOIP where we might just click on a name to Skype someone.

—"Turning off" a light.

—Web sites that are made to look like the thing they represent, like an online book that includes curled page corners, a cover, "next page" links. etc., or a shopping site that is an image of a store with things on shelves. An example.

—Shopping cart icons on ecommerce web sites.

—Diacritical marks in languages like French and Portuguese, where they are added to indicate a dropped character but otherwise have no effect on the modern pronunciation of the word.

—The reel-to-reel tape machine icon used on cell phones to indicate a voice mail message.

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When did people stop being ok with soup just being itself?

Got any skeuomorphs?