Theologians' Soup (Sopa Teóloga)

History

Sopa teóloga is a rich, deeply built soup of the Peruvian table — a fortifying broth poured over fried bread and layered with poultry, meats, and giblets. In this version the broth is drawn from turkey, hen, pigeon, beef, and lamb, with head and feet and a handful of chickpeas, simmered slowly in a covered pot; the tureen is first laid with cubes of bread fried in pork fat or butter, then carrots, green peas, and cabbage cooked apart, onions steeped in salted hot water, and the finely chopped giblets — livers, heart, gizzards, and the immature egg-clusters of laying hens — with slices of hard-boiled egg, before the boiling broth is poured over and the covered pot is left to rest ten minutes. It is a documented colonial-era dish whose origin food histories place in a Peruvian convent kitchen, and the composition here matches that tradition closely: a hen-and-turkey broth thick with giblets and buttered bread, exactly the picture a 19th-century account gives of livers, gizzards, hearts, and little eggs bubbling in friendly confusion beneath slices of buttery bread.

The recipe's own account ties the soup to the Augustinian friars of Lima, saying it formed part of the lavish banquets with which they feted the guests invited to their theological conferences and took its name from them — a fitting story for a soup meant, the contributor jokes, to fortify the brains of those learned men. The broader documented tradition, however, locates the dish's convent origin in Trujillo, in Peru's north, and one 19th-century source (Ricardo Palma's Tradiciones peruanas, 1883) credits Dominican rather than Augustinian theologians with inventing it — so the specific Lima-and-Augustinian attribution is best read as the story that traveled with this particular recipe rather than a settled history. It reached Gorriti's compilation from Lima by way of Clorinda Matto de Turner, one of Peru's major writers and a figure of the same Lima literary circles Gorriti hosted, who closes not with cooking but with a longing for the friend she hopes this 'powerful agent of life' will help live to see Lima again. What the recipe cannot fix is the dish's date or the route by which a northern conventual soup came to be told as a Lima one; those it leaves to the tradition.

Ingredients

• turkey meat
• hen
• squab (pichones, young pigeons)
• beef
• lamb
• lamb head and feet
• 1 handful chickpeas
• salt
• bread, cut in dice
• manteca de chancho (pork lard) or butter
• carrots
• green peas (alberjas)
• cabbage
• onions
• poultry giblets (livers, heart, gizzards, egg clusters)
• hard-boiled eggs

Instructions

1. Make a broth from turkey, hen, squab, beef, lamb, and lamb head and feet, with a handful of chickpeas, salted to taste, simmered slowly in a covered pot.
2. In the tureen, place small cubes of bread fried in pork lard (manteca de chancho) or butter.
3. Add carrots, green peas, and cabbage that have been pre-cooked separately in their own broth, plus onions soaked in salted hot water.
4. Finely chop all the poultry giblets (livers, heart, gizzards, egg clusters) from the broth birds and add them, along with sliced hard-boiled eggs.
5. Pour the well-boiling broth over everything, cover the tureen, let it rest ten minutes, and serve.