How Alphabet Soup Letters Are Made

Chances are, you ate alphabet soup when you were a kid, and maybe played with your food and spelled out funny words using the bite-sized pieces of macaroni shaped into different letters from the alphabet. Chances are, your parents and perhaps your grandparents did the exact same thing when they were kids. Cans of alphabet soup have been around for a long time, and they're a staple of the Campbell's soup brand beloved by Andy Warhol, but how do they make all of those tiny letters?

Alphabet pasta is made the same way as most modern and obscure pasta shapes out there: through a process called extrusion. After the flour and water have all been mixed into pasta dough, the mixture is run through a machine with a special plate at the end, which has holes designed to create specific shapes. It's sort of like Play-Doh, except less colorful and much more edible. A spinning blade chops the pasta into smaller pieces as it comes through the hole.

Alphabet pasta requires 26 different molds, which often requires more specialized machinery. Some pasta manufacturers buy pasta-making machines which push the pasta dough through multiple letter molds side-by-side. Then, an assortment of randomized pasta letters are already flowing down a conveyor belt and can be easily added into cans of soup.

Homemade alphabet pasta is tricky to make, since it's not just one pasta shape like tagliolini or tagliatelle — it's 26 different pasta shapes. Most recipes for homemade alphabet soup usually tell you to simply buy premade alphabet macaroni from a grocery store. However, if you're working with homemade pasta dough, there are alphabet pasta discs you can attach to certain types of pasta makers to get you the letter molds you're looking for. After that, the literary macaroni is almost always served in a tomato soup, with vegetables optional but welcome.

It's hard to pin down an exact origin for alphabet soup. The phrase "alphabet soup" dates at least as far back as Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidency in the 1930s, when the phrase was jeeringly used to criticize all the different three-letter agencies created during the New Deal. The first mention of soup with macaroni letters dates back to the late 1800s. By the early 1900s, jokes about messages appearing in alphabet soup were fairly common in jokes and comic strips. Campbell's only started selling soup with letters in 1915, although it was called Campbell's Vegetable Soup and not "alphabet soup" until they added those words to the name many decades later.