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Apple Soup, German
Peel half a dozen large fresh apples, cut out the cores, and boil them thoroughly with three pints of water, a thick slice of the crumb of bread finely grated, the rind and juice of half a lemon, and a quarter of an ounce of powdered cinnamon. When cooked to a pulp, rub them through a sieve. Add two glasses of white wine, and sweeten to taste. Serve with toasted bread. Sufficient for four or five persons. Time, one hour. Probable cost, 7d., exclusive of the wine.
A sweet fruit soup, thickened with grated bread rather than flour or cream. The proportions are sound but two of them need scaling for modern palates.
- The cinnamonA quarter of an ounce of ground cinnamon is roughly a tablespoon (about three teaspoons), which will dominate everything and can turn the soup gritty. Start with a teaspoon. The recipe calls for powdered cinnamon, but two or three whole sticks lifted out before sieving is a cleaner substitute.
- Liquid measureThree imperial pints is about 60 fl oz, or 7 to 7.5 US cups. Six large apples to that much water gives a thin soup; hold back a cup and add it at the end if you want it looser.
- "Two glasses of white wine"A Victorian wine glass was roughly 2 to 2.5 fl oz, so this means about half a cup in total, not two tumblers. Add it off the heat so the alcohol and aroma survive; a dry Riesling suits the dish.
- The bread"The crumb of bread" means the soft interior of a stale white loaf, crust discarded, grated on a box grater. It is the only thickener here, so use a genuinely dry loaf — fresh sandwich bread turns to paste and clouds the texture.
- TimingOne hour of boiling is far longer than modern apples need. Bramleys collapse in 20 to 25 minutes; sweeter dessert apples in 15. Cook only until they fall apart, or the fresh apple flavour boils away.
- SievingA food mill or a blitz with an immersion blender replaces rubbing through a sieve. Pass it through a fine sieve afterwards if you want the smooth, almost velvety body the original intends.
- SweeteningTaste after the wine goes in, not before — the acid shifts the balance. Two to four tablespoons of sugar is usual, and the lemon rind and juice should stay assertive enough to keep it from being cloying.
- ServingServes four or five as a first or last course. "Serve with toasted bread" means small dry croutons or fingers of toast floated on top; the soup is good hot, and equally good chilled.
German cookery has a long-established family of sweet fruit soups — Apfelsuppe, cherry and plum versions, and the chilled Kaltschale — served either to open a meal or to close it, a habit that struck English writers as distinctly continental. Cassell's labels the dish "German," and the recipe carries the marks of its origin: bread crumb as thickener rather than roux or cream, lemon for acid, and white wine stirred in at the finish. Thickening with grated stale bread is older than flour-based liaisons and shows up across northern and eastern Europe wherever bread was too valuable to waste. The costing of sevenpence, wine excluded, is typical of the dictionary's late-Victorian editions, which priced almost every entry so a household could judge a dish before committing to it.