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WINE SOUP (a German recipe)
Take two ounces of butter and melt it in a stewpan. In this brown two table-spoonfuls of flour, stir into it a pint of water, add three or four ounces of sugar, the rind and juice of a lemon, a stick of cinnamon, and a bottle of wine. Simmer ten minutes. Place in a tureen the yolks of six eggs, pour over them slowly the wine soup, and send to table with toasted sippets.
A sweet wine soup of the sort served in German households as a light supper or invalid dish. The whole thing hangs on the final step: the yolks are cooked by the heat of the soup alone, and must never be allowed to boil.
- The hinge: tempering the yolksBeat the yolks in the tureen first, then add the hot soup in a thin stream while whisking constantly. Pour it in fast and you get sweet scrambled egg suspended in wine. If the mixture must be reheated, do it below a simmer and stop as soon as it coats a spoon.
- Imperial measuresA pint here is 20 fl oz, not 16. A Victorian wine bottle is close enough to a modern 750 ml, so the finished soup is roughly 1.3 litres of liquid before the yolks, less whatever the ten minutes' simmering carries off.
- Which wineA light white suits the flavouring best — hock, Moselle or any dry Riesling. A heavy oaked white or a red will fight the lemon and cinnamon. Nothing sweet is needed since three to four ounces of sugar is already going in.
- Sugar to tasteThree to four ounces is 85-115 g, which reads very sweet to modern palates on top of a whole bottle of wine. Start at the lower end and adjust once the lemon juice is in.
- Browning the flourTwo ounces of butter to two tablespoons of flour is a loose roux; cook it to a nut brown over moderate heat before the water goes in, which is what gives the soup its colour and takes the raw edge off the flour.
- Strain before servingThe cinnamon stick and the strips of lemon rind should come out — pass the soup through a sieve into the tureen over the yolks rather than fishing for them afterwards.
- SippetsSmall triangles or cubes of bread, toasted dry or fried in butter, handed separately so they do not go to pulp. Modern croutons do the same job.
- AlcoholTen minutes at a simmer drives off some alcohol but by no means all of it. This is not a dish for children, despite its nursery associations.
- YieldEnough for six to eight as a first or last course, in small cups rather than soup plates.
Weinsuppe belongs to a family of sweet and semi-sweet soups that were ordinary fare across German-speaking Europe and Scandinavia well into the twentieth century, eaten at the start of a meal, at the end of one, or on their own with bread. It appears at a period when English cookery writers were briskly collecting continental dishes for middle-class households, and when wine, beer and milk soups still seemed a reasonable use of a bottle. The technique — a brown roux thinned with liquid, then finished off the heat with egg yolks — is the same liaison used for a Victorian sauce or a custard, and lemon with cinnamon is a long-established pairing in German sweet cookery. Such soups were also given to invalids, on the general nineteenth-century principle that wine and eggs were strengthening.