The story
A grand old-fashioned dinner moved through its courses in a set order. It began with soup and, many dishes later, ended with a plate of nuts at the table. Name the first course and the last, and everything in between is included.
Americans were using the phrase that way by the 1850s. An 1852 magazine, The Working Man’s Friend, and Family Instructor, described a hurried diner who “could get from soup to nuts in ten minutes.”
Before long it meant the whole of anything. In 1910, the baseball great Christy Mathewson wrote of a player who “knew the game from ‘soup to nuts.’”
The idea is far older than any American dinner. The Roman poet Horace wrote “ab ovo usque ad mala,” from the egg to the apples. A Roman dinner often began with eggs and ended with fruit, so the phrase meant start to finish.
The menu has changed since then. Few dinners now end with a dish of nuts, but the phrase has outlasted the custom, the same way people still “dial” a phone.
