The soup was invented in 1940 by Fred Brown, the executive chef of the Hotel Roanoke, which was originally built in 1882 by the Norfolk and Western Railway, now Northern Southern. (In 1989 Norfolk Southern deeded the hotel for $1 to Virginia Tech.) Brown’s peanut soup quickly became the hotel’s signature dish. “He had a very inquisitive mind, and he was always trying to develop something new,” Douglas Dowe, Brown’s brother-in-law, recalled in an interview with the Roanoke Times in 1999. “Eventually, he hit upon the soup.”
The soup.
Brown, an African-American, started working at the hotel in 1922, when he was still in high school. He began as a runner, fetching supplies from the storeroom, but gradually worked his way up the ladder in the hotel’s kitchen—boiler cook, fry cook, roast cook, assistant chef. Brown left for a job at the Greenbrier, the world-famous resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, but he returned to the Hotel Roanoke in 1937 as its executive chef.
Brown didn’t have much in the way of formal training, but, according to Dowe, “He was an especially creative cook and liked to try new recipes.”
Brown, who died in 1984, reportedly tried (unsuccessfully) to patent the soup he’d invented. For a while the recipe was a closely guarded secret, but eventually the hotel made it available—as it appears below—to anyone who asked for it.
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