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WINE SOUP, WITH LEMON (a German recipe)
Cut two lemons into thin slices, and take out the seeds. Put the slices in a tureen and cover with powered sugar. Melt a piece of butter in a stewpan, and throw in a cupful of grated bread to brown. Keep the crumbs shaken or stirred till they are crisp, then strew them over the lemon-slices. Make boiling hot a quart of wine, with a pint of water and sufficient sugar; pour it over the lemon-slices; cover closely for a few minutes, and serve with sponge-cakes.
A hot sweet wine soup of the sort German households served as a light supper or a restorative. The technique is simple; the results depend almost entirely on the wine and on when the crumbs go in.
- The hinge: crumbs last, and only just before servingThe fried crumbs are there for crispness against the hot liquid. Strew them over the lemon and pour the wine on immediately before it goes to table — if the tureen stands, they collapse into paste.
- Imperial measuresCassell's quart is 40 fl oz (a shade under 5 US cups) and the pint 20 fl oz (about 2 1/2 cups), so the liquid comes to roughly 60 fl oz, about 1 1/2 imperial quarts. If you are working from US measures, scale down by about a sixth.
- What wineThe recipe says only 'wine'. For a German dish of this kind a light Rhine or Moselle white — a dry to off-dry Riesling or Silvaner — is the likeliest fit; something oaky or high in alcohol turns harsh when heated.
- Heat, not boilThe recipe says 'make boiling hot'; in practice stopping just short, at the point of steaming, treats the wine better. Held at a rolling boil it loses aroma and alcohol and the acidity sharpens.
- "A piece of butter"Genuinely unspecified. For a cupful of crumbs, 1 1/2 to 2 oz (3-4 tbsp) is enough to brown them without leaving fat floating on the soup.
- Grated breadThis is fresh breadcrumb grated from a stale crumb loaf, not dried packaged crumbs, which brown too fast and taste of nothing. Keep the pan moving over medium heat until the crumbs are dry and evenly golden.
- Sugar is left to the cookNo quantity is given for either the lemons or the wine. Start with about 1/4 cup over the lemon slices and 1/3 cup in the wine, then taste — the lemon here is aggressive and the soup wants to land clearly sweet.
- Slice the lemons thinThin means nearly translucent, pith included; thick slices give more bitterness than perfume.
- ServingServe hot with the sponge-cakes the recipe calls for, for dipping. Nothing in the text fixes the course, though a sweet hot wine soup of this kind reads more as a supper dish than a first course.
Sweet wine soups — Weinsuppe in the hot version, Kaltschale when cold and fruited — were a fixture of German domestic cookery in the nineteenth century, eaten as a light supper, a Sunday-evening dish, or fed to convalescents on the long-standing belief that warm wine was strengthening. The dish appears flagged as German rather than being folded in with the English soups, and the pairing with sponge-cakes points to the habit of serving a sweet liquid with dry biscuits for dipping. The fried breadcrumb garnish is a thrifty older device found across German cooking, from Semmelbrösel over noodles to buttered crumbs on vegetables, and it does the work here that a crouton does in a savoury soup.