Ranee Mueller wrote:
>
> Does _anyone_ use these to make soup? Was there
> ever a time that it was common to do so?

When I was a college student, I practically lived off
these things for much of the first year. You can make
them with a coil immersion heater, which was a big plus.
I lost a lot of weight that year. Had there not been
a cheap donut shop across the street from campus,
I might have become seriously undernourished.

After that I switched to deluxe food. Campbell's soup
from a can. That's eating!

There's a trick to preparing a healthful soup from
a can using an immersion heater. I would take my
16-oz Pyrex measuring cup, fill it half way with water,
boil the water, break an egg into it and IMMEDIATELY
beat it hard into the water with a fork (so that it
would become like a yellowish milk, rather than
scraps of cooked egg), then dump the canned soup
into it and stir with the fork. The immersion heater
would only touch pure water, not the soup or anything
with egg in it.