20 Things to Serve With Soup Besides Bread

In Sweden, Thursday soup comes with pancakes, and has for centuries.

Nobody there thinks that’s odd. Plenty of soup-eating places never touch a bread basket, and what they reach for instead is usually more fun.

So the rules here are strict. No sandwiches, no rolls, no flatbreads, no croutons, and yes, that rules out grilled cheese. What’s left is 20 things that go next to the bowl, each with a fact you can repeat at the table.

1. Oyster Crackers

Oyster crackers have a disputed inventor, an unclear name and no oysters.

Two bakeries claim them. The Westminster Cracker Company, now of Rutland, Vermont, says it’s been making them since 1828. A rival story credits Adam Exton, who set up his cracker bakery in Trenton, New Jersey in 1847.

Nobody knows for sure why they’re called that, either. The best guesses are that they were first served with oyster stew or clam chowder, or that they look a bit like an oyster in its shell. The actual ingredients are flour, shortening, leavening, yeast, sugar and salt.

In Cincinnati they’re a regular next to the city’s chili. A meatless chili is a fine place to start.

2. Pancakes

The Swedish pancake habit is said to go back to the 1400s, when Catholic kitchens served big meals on Thursdays to get ready for the Friday fast.

Then Sweden turned Lutheran and the pancakes stayed anyway. You’ll still find the combo at family gatherings, in workplace cafeterias, on kids’ menus and in tourist restaurants.

The pancakes are thin, closer to crepes, and they come after the soup with whipped cream and berry jam. They’re made with eggs and milk.

The soup is pea soup, which Sweden and Finland have been eating since at least the 13th century. King Eric XIV is said to have died after a bowl laced with arsenic, which is one way to make a dish famous. The traditional pot is cooked with pork, so make yours a meatless yellow pea soup.

3. Plum Cake

Somewhere in Germany, during plum season, potato soup and plum cake is dinner. Not dinner and dessert. Dinner.

It’s a common main dish in the Palatinate, in the country’s southwest, where it goes by Grumbeersupp und Quetschekuche. Grumbeer is the local dialect word for potato.

The cake is a sheet cake topped with plums, and the idea is to go back and forth between the two. Yes, a cake is the closest thing on this list to cheating.

Palatine potato soup often has smoked sausage or bacon in it, so pick a meatless one. The cake has dairy and usually eggs.

4. Popcorn

Order a cream of vegetable soup in Ecuador’s Andes and it can show up with popcorn.

The soups are called cremas, and they’re made with asparagus, squash, Andean pumpkin or pretty much any other vegetable. The popcorn does the crouton’s job with a lot more personality.

It’s not a one-soup trick. Popcorn, toasted corn and plantain chips turn up next to other Ecuadorian soups too, and the local word for popcorn is canguil.

Plain popcorn is vegan. Butter makes it dairy.

5. Avocado

Same country, different side. If you’re served soup in Ecuador, you can pretty much always expect avocado and aji, the local hot sauce, on the table.

The classic match is locro de papa, a thick potato soup that’s a staple in the Andes. It gets served hot with chopped avocado and crumbled fresh white cheese on top, and the soup itself takes milk and cheese, so it’s a dairy bowl.

Mexico does it too. Avocado is one of the standard things that goes on tortilla soup.

6. Hot Boiled Potatoes

In a 1995 University of Sydney study, boiled potatoes scored more than three times higher than white bread for fullness.

Here’s what that actually covers. Groups of 11 to 13 people ate 240-calorie portions of 38 foods and rated how full they felt for two hours afterward. White bread was the baseline at 100 percent, boiled potatoes came out on top at 323 percent, and the croissant finished last at 47.

Lithuania worked this out without a lab. Its bright pink cold beet soup, šaltibarščiai, is typically served with hot boiled potatoes on the side.

The soup is beets with kefir or buttermilk, often with a chopped hard-boiled egg, so it’s dairy and egg. The earliest documented recipe is from the late 18th century, and Vilnius has thrown the soup an annual celebration since 2023.

7. Fufu

You’re not supposed to chew it.

Fufu is what’s called a swallow food. You pinch a piece off with the fingers of your right hand, shape it into a small ball, dip it in the soup and down it goes.

The word is Twi and comes from the Akans in Ghana. It was originally made from boiled cassava, plantains and cocoyam, pounded until smooth.

The cassava is the newcomer. Portuguese traders brought it to Africa from Brazil in the 16th century, and before that fufu was mainly cocoyam, plantain and yams.

Fufu is vegan. The peanut and palm nut soups it goes with are commonly made with meat or fish, so look for a meatless one.

8. Rice Balls

Ghana has a second answer, and it’s rice. Omo tuo is rice cooked with extra water so it goes soft, beaten smooth and shaped into sizable balls.

It usually comes with groundnut or palm nut soup, and it’s often a Sunday thing. It’s also Ghana’s version of tuwon shinkafa, a Hausa staple from Nigeria.

Same note as fufu: the ball is the side, and the soup should be a meatless one.

9. A Bowl of Plain Rice

Japan’s standard meal is called “one soup, three dishes,” and the rice is so assumed it doesn’t get counted.

The format is ichiju sansai: a bowl of rice, soup, a main dish and two sides. The pickles don’t get counted either. Rice and soup are the frame, and everything else is the side.

It’s old, too. The format traces back to Heian period court cuisine, and in 2013 traditional Japanese food culture went on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list.

One catch. Japanese soups are typically built on dashi, and standard dashi uses dried fish, so if you’re having miso soup next to that rice, you want one made with kelp or mushroom stock.

10. Kimchi

Traditional kimchi isn’t vegetarian.

Its intense savory flavor comes from fermented seafood called jeotgal. That can be anything from squid and anchovies to fish sauce or shrimp paste.

So buy a jar with a vegan stamp, or scan the ingredient list for fish sauce and shrimp. Temple-style kimchi is vegetarian by nature.

It’s worth the label reading. In Korea, soup is part of the main course, served alongside rice and a spread of side dishes, and kimchi is on the table at nearly every meal.

11. Dates

In many Moroccan families, the Ramadan fast ends with three sips of water and a date.

Then comes harira, the soup built on chickpeas, tomatoes and lentils. It’s usually served with dates and other dried fruit like figs, plus honey sweets.

The best known of those sweets is chebakia, a small sesame cookie shaped like a flower, fried and coated in honey.

Harira is mostly a Ramadan soup, though it can be made any time of year. The traditional pot includes a small amount of meat, so a meatless one is the version to put your dates next to.

12. Hard-Boiled Eggs

Harira’s other regular is a hard-boiled egg sprinkled with salt and cumin.

That’s the whole item. Salt and cumin on a boiled egg is the kind of idea you’ll wonder why you needed Morocco to hand you.

13. Croquettes

In Poland, you drink the soup and eat the croquette.

The soup is clear red barszcz, served in a cup. Next to it sits a krokiet, a rolled, filled crepe that’s breaded and fried, and the one you want is stuffed with sauerkraut and mushrooms.

This is Christmas Eve food. The day is observed as a fast, which means no meat, though the fast still allows fish and krokiety get meat fillings the rest of the year. The sauerkraut and mushroom one is the meatless pick, and it contains egg and usually dairy.

The same barszcz also comes with uszka, mushroom-filled mini dumplings whose name means “little ears.”

14. Papadum

This cracker is made of beans.

Papadum dough is black gram bean flour, either deep-fried or flipped over an open flame until it’s crunchy. Other versions use chickpea, rice, lentil or potato flour. It’s a standard accompaniment to a meal across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, and it’s a natural next to rasam, the peppery South Indian soup.

The best story here belongs to Lijjat. In 1959, seven women who were neighbors borrowed 80 rupees to buy ingredients. Their first output was four packets of papad.

As of 2013, the cooperative had more than 40,000 members, 62 branches across 17 states and annual turnover of roughly 100 million US dollars.

15. Lentil Doughnuts (Medu Vada)

Take the same black gram, turn it into batter and fry it in a ring, and you get a savory doughnut.

Medu vada is crispy outside, soft inside and usually served with coconut chutney and sambar, the soupy lentil and vegetable stew. It’s vegan.

Its origin can be traced with “some certainty” to the town of Maddur in Karnataka. Udupi restaurant owners in Mumbai made it popular outside South India.

16. Tortilla Chips

The triangle tortilla chip got popular as a way to use up factory rejects.

In the 1940s, Rebecca Webb Carranza and her husband ran a Mexican delicatessen and tortilla factory in southwest Los Angeles. The automated machine kept spitting out misshapen tortillas, so she turned them into chips and sold them for a dime a bag at the El Zarape Tortilla Factory.

She didn’t invent the idea from nothing. Totopos and tostadas were already well known in Mexican cooking, and Ignacio Anaya used fried tortilla triangles for the nachos he created in 1943. In 1994, Carranza received the Golden Tortilla award for her contribution to the Mexican food industry.

They’re corn, not wheat, so they pass the no-bread test. Tortilla soup is traditionally made with chicken broth, so put your chips next to a meatless tortilla soup, a black bean soup or a chili.

17. A Plate of Fresh Herbs

In southern Vietnam, the noodle soup comes with a build-it-yourself kit.

The plate holds Thai basil, bean sprouts, lime and culantro, and you add what you like. It became standard in the south after the country was partitioned in 1954.

The north keeps it simpler, with scallions, onions and cilantro, and northern-style purists skip the plate.

The soup in question is pho, which is a beef or chicken soup. Borrow the plate and set it next to any meatless noodle soup.

18. Salad

A salad before a meal can shrink the meal or grow it, and the difference is what’s on the salad.

That’s what happened in a Penn State lab study. Forty-two women ate lunch in the lab once a week for seven weeks, with either a first-course salad or none, then as much pasta as they wanted.

When the salad was light, they ate less across the whole meal: 7% fewer calories with the small salad and 12% fewer with the large one. When the salad was heavy, they ate 8% more with the small one and 17% more with the large one.

The researchers made the salads heavier by changing the amount and type of dressing and cheese. It was one study, in one university town, with pasta instead of soup. Still, it’s a fun thing to know while you’re holding the ranch.

19. Cheese Crisps

Real Parmigiano Reggiano is never vegetarian.

That’s written into the rules, not a quirk of one producer. The cheese’s official EU product document lists three raw materials: cow’s milk, salt and calf rennet. Only calf rennet can be used to set the curd, no additives are allowed, the cheese has to mature for at least 12 months, and a wheel has to weigh at least 30 kg.

That matters here because a cheese crisp is grated hard cheese baked or pan-crisped until it snaps, and it’s the best crouton stand-in going. Parmigiano is the one most people grab for it.

Grab a hard cheese labeled vegetarian or made with microbial rennet.

20. Olives

You can’t eat an olive straight off the tree.

It won’t hurt you. Raw olives are bitter, not toxic, thanks to a chemical called oleuropein, and curing is what fixes them. The main methods are water, brine and lye. Lye does the job in about a day, and brine takes months.

Green and black olives are the same fruit at different stages.

Greece puts them next to fakes, its lentil soup, which is traditionally served with something salty. Salty olives count, and so does feta, which is dairy. The bowl gets a spoonful of olive oil and a drizzle of red wine vinegar, too.

The Bread Basket Was Never a Rule

Nobody passed a law that says soup comes with bread. You just got handed a basket once and never questioned it.

Sweden is having pancakes on Thursday. What’s your excuse?