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Fruit Soups
On a blistering hot day fruit soups served very cold are sometimes more acceptable than one that must be served very hot to be pala-table. For this purpose cherries, apricots, peaches, plums, and other meaty fruits are best. They may be used separately for a soup that takes its name from the fruit used, or may be combined and called simply fruit soup or given a more fanciful name from some flavoring used.
These soups are only slightly sweetened, as the tartness is an agreeable preface to a hot-day dinner. 1 pint crushed fruit; 1 pint water; 1/4 pint red wine or 1/2 glassful currant or raspberry jelly; a stick of cinnamon; a blade of mace; juice and a little grated rind of lemon; 2 table-spoonfuls sugar; 2 tablespoonfuls arrowroot. Stew the fruit in the water until soft, crack a few of the stones, and add the kernels while cooking. Strain through a coarse strainer, using a silver spoon to press the pulp through the strainer. Put back into the saucepan; add the lemon juice, sugar, and arrowroot, which has been mixed with cold water, stirring constantly until it thickens. Let it cook until the arrowroot is clear. Add the jelly and stir until dissolved. Take from the fire and cool, then add the wine, and put on the ice until thoroughly chilled. Serve in bouillon cups, with bits of cracked ice and a few whole cherries or firm red raspberries to each cup.
Small triangles of buttered toast, or toasted wafers, may be served as an adjunct.
Should the water boil down while the fruit is cooking, add more. It should be the consistency of a thick fruit syrup when strained.
A cold, lightly thickened fruit soup of the sort that circulated in American cookbooks around 1900 under the heading of foreign cookery. One step in it should not be reproduced, and several others need translating.
- The cracked stones are the problemThe instruction to crack a few stones and stew the kernels puts amygdalin into the pot, which breaks down into hydrogen cyanide. Apricot and peach kernels are the worst offenders — a handful can carry a meaningful dose, and children are at risk from very few. The practice was common when this was written because the kernels give a bitter-almond (noyau) perfume, but the quantity here is unmeasured and the exposure is not controlled by the brief stewing. Use a current recipe for cold fruit soup rather than this one.
- What a "glassful" meansThe alternative to the quarter-pint of wine is "1/2 glassful" of currant or raspberry jelly, and the book gives no size for the glass. Period usage generally means a small tumbler or wine glass, so somewhere between two and four tablespoons — genuinely ambiguous, and the two options are not equivalent in volume.
- Arrowroot behaves differently from cornstarchTwo tablespoons to a quart of liquid gives a light syrupy body. Arrowroot thins if held at a hard boil or reheated, so it is brought just to the point where it clears and then taken off. It also sets glossy and translucent rather than cloudy, which is why it was preferred for fruit.
- The silver spoonSilver was specified because tinned iron and steel discoloured acid fruit pulp. Stainless steel or nylon is fine now; a coarse sieve or food mill does the same work faster.
- Sweetening and acidityTwo tablespoons of sugar to a pint of fruit is deliberately restrained; the recipe says so itself, calling the tartness 'an agreeable preface to a hot-day dinner'. Taste as you go, since the sweetness of the fruit you buy may not match what the writer had.
- YieldRoughly a quart, though the reducing and straining make the finished volume uncertain; three or four bouillon cups. The suggested toast triangles or wafers are the whole accompaniment; the headnote calls the soup a 'preface to a hot-day dinner', so this is a first course, not a dessert.