A kind of food made by boiling meat in water; broth. This mixture is usually called in America, broth or soup, but not porridge. With us, porridge is a mixture of meal or flour, boiled with water. Perhaps this distinction is not always observed.
Any time I walk past the Brasserie restaurant in midtown I laugh because I remember how a friend thought the place was called The Brothery — as in broth (not pronounced like "brother" but like broth-er-ee). He thought he was meeting someone for soup and was surprised to find it was an extravagent (to him) French restaurant called the Brasserie. He was confused to imagine that a place in midtown specialized in soup or, stranger yet, broth. He imagined a menu of 100 pages listing broths from all corners of the world: broth done African style with smashed peanuts; broth done southern style with smashed crackers; cajun broth with picante sauce? When he told me about the Brothery we discovered that neither of us really knew what broth was. I thought of it as prison or orphanage food while my friend thought broth was a more robust product. We were both wrong to think of it as an independent, singular foodstuff. I think I confused broth with gruel, and he might have thought broth was something like stew.
