Take one quart of fresh beer. Sweeten to taste and flavor with a pinch of cinnamon and nutmeg. Slice a lemon very thin and put in the beer. Let get very cold on ice and serve with sponge-cake.
August 31 — No. 31
German
An uncooked cold soup, closer to a chilled punch than anything simmered. The whole dish depends on the beer, so choose it deliberately.
- Which beer"Fresh beer" most likely means simply beer that is not stale or flat, and the beer of the period would generally have been milder and less hopped than a modern IPA. A German-style Weissbier, Kölsch or Märzen suits the dish; a heavily hopped IPA turns the sweetened soup bitter.
- Quantity and yieldOne quart serves four as a first course in small cups, or two as a summer supper dish. Multiply straight up with no adjustment.
- SweeteningStart with about two tablespoons of sugar per quart and taste. Dissolve it in a spoonful of warm water or use a simple syrup first — granulated sugar dissolves slowly in cold beer, and the stirring needed to get it in costs you carbonation.
- The lemonSlice it paper-thin and leave the peel on, but pull the slices out after an hour or so. Left overnight the white pith turns the whole bowl bitter.
- SpicesA pinch means a pinch. Use ground cinnamon and freshly grated nutmeg, both barely visible; the spicing should read as warmth behind the lemon, not as mulled beer.
- "Very cold on ice"The original means setting the covered bowl in an ice chest, not adding ice to the soup. Chill it in the refrigerator two to three hours, or nest the bowl in ice water for thirty minutes. Diluting it with melting ice flattens it.
- The sponge-cakeServe it alongside or crumble it in at the table. Stirred in early it dissolves into paste — this is the point where the dish either reads as a soup or as a mess.
This is a *Bierkaltschale*, one of a family of German cold soups — *Kaltschale* means literally "cold bowl" — that also includes versions on wine, buttermilk, and puréed summer fruit. They were warm-weather dishes, and they are often said to have belonged as much to the afternoon coffee table as to dinner, which may be why cake accompanies rather than bread. Beer soups themselves are much older and were once eaten hot and thickened with eggs or cream as a breakfast food in northern Germany and Scandinavia, in an era when weak beer was a domestic staple beverage rather than a treat. A book like this, arranged as one dish per day and one nation after another, can be read as selling American readers the idea that dinner could be a small tour of Europe; a sweetened iced beer with lemon was exotic enough to intrigue and simple enough that nobody needed to shop.