Mix 3 pints of red wine with 1 pint of water. Add sugar, nutmeg and cinnamon to taste and the grated peel of half a lemon. Let come to a boil; then stir in the yolks of 2 well-beaten eggs. Do not boil again. Serve hot with biscuits.
January 17 — No. 17
Bavarian
A hot wine soup thickened with egg yolk — closer to a mulled wine than to anything served in a bowl with a spoon, though the Germans and Austrians treated it as a proper first course. The whole dish turns on the moment the yolks go in.
- Do not boil after the eggsThe instruction "do not boil again" is the hinge. Yolks set around 160-170F; if the wine returns to a boil you get sweetened scrambled egg suspended in claret. Pull the pan from the heat, temper a ladle of hot wine into the beaten yolks first, then return the mixture and stir over low heat until it thickens slightly.
- Quantities and yieldThree pints of wine plus one of water is two quarts. The wine alone is about two standard 750ml bottles. That serves eight to ten as a cup, and six or more as a soup course. Halve it freely; the proportions hold.
- The wineUse something dry, red and unremarkable — a everyday Spätburgunder, Dornfelder or an inexpensive Côtes du Rhône. Oaky or high-alcohol bottles turn harsh when heated, and the sugar and spice will bury anything subtle.
- Sugar to tasteStart at about 1/3 cup for the full quantity and adjust once the spices are in. Sweetness reads differently hot than cold, so taste at serving temperature, not while it is warming.
- SpicesA whole cinnamon stick and a few gratings of fresh nutmeg steeped during the heating give a cleaner result than ground cinnamon, which turns the soup cloudy and gritty. Fish the stick out before the yolks go in.
- Lemon peelGrate only the yellow zest; the white pith is bitter and the acid of the wine will draw it out. A peeled strip of zest, steeped and removed, is tidier still.
- "Biscuits"Most likely a dry sweet biscuit here — Zwieback, a rusk, a wafer or a plain butter cookie — rather than an American baking-powder biscuit. Something firm enough to dip.
- AlcoholBringing the wine briefly to a boil drives off some but by no means all of the alcohol. This remains an alcoholic drink and should be treated as one.
Weinsuppe belongs to a large family of Central European soups built on a liquid that is not stock — wine, beer, milk, or fruit juice — thickened with egg or bread and served hot at the start of a meal or, in Bavaria and Austria, on cold mornings and at Christmas. The technique is essentially that of a sabayon or zabaglione worked at soup strength, and the same logic underlies Biersuppe, Kaltschale and the German Weinschaumsoße spooned over puddings. Books of this sort, organised as a dish a day from a different country, were selling the idea of variety to home cooks whose repertoire was narrow; the "national" attributions in them are often loose, but a red wine soup with egg yolk, cinnamon and lemon is a genuinely South German thing and the label here is fair. The instruction to serve it with biscuits marks it as a light supper or an invalid's dish as much as a course in a formal dinner — hot wine with egg was long regarded as strengthening, a belief older than any documentation of this particular version.