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Cherry Soup
For one quart of soup pit and crush a pint of cherries; add to them the juice of one lemon, sugar to taste, and a dessertspoon of tapioca or sago. Simmer thirty minutes with a pint of water; rub smooth through a sieve and re-heat, adding one tablespoon of claret and a pinch of salt. Let cool, then place on ice before serving. Reserve a few stemmed cherries to put in the iced soup at the last.
A cold fruit soup thickened lightly with tapioca, in the German and Scandinavian manner. The whole thing hangs on the cherries being tart enough to read as a soup rather than a thin dessert sauce.
- Cherry choiceSour cherries (Montmorency, morello) give the acidity this needs; if you use sweet Bings, cut the sugar back sharply and keep the full lemon. A pint of pitted cherries is roughly 10-11 oz, about 300 g.
- DessertspoonA dessertspoon falls between a teaspoon and a tablespoon: reckon it as 2 teaspoons. That is a deliberately small amount, meant to give body, not a pudding.
- Tapioca or sagoUse small pearl tapioca and expect the thirty minutes of simmering to be needed to make the pearls translucent; soak them first if they are large. Instant or minute tapioca will thicken in five minutes and turn gluey over thirty, so add it near the end instead.
- SievingPush the whole mixture through a fine sieve with the back of a ladle rather than a food mill, and stop when only skins remain. Blending instead of sieving aerates the soup and dulls the color.
- ClaretClaret meant red Bordeaux. Any dry, moderately tannic red works; a single tablespoon in a quart is there for depth and a little astringency, not for flavor you can name.
- Consistency after chillingTapioca sets further as it cools. Judge the thickness while warm and leave it looser than you want it, or thin the chilled soup with a little cold water before serving.
- On ice"Place on ice" meant the icebox or a bowl nested in ice; four hours in the refrigerator does the same. Serve it thoroughly cold, and taste again once chilled, as cold blunts both sugar and salt.
- YieldOne quart serves four as a first course, or three in shallow soup plates. The reserved cherries go in at the last moment before serving, so they stay firm.
Cold cherry soup belongs to a Central and Eastern European tradition — Hungarian hideg meggyleves, German Kirschsuppe, the Scandinavian sweet fruit soups — in which fruit thickened with sago, tapioca or starch was served as a course in its own right rather than as dessert. American cookbooks of the late nineteenth century picked these up as summer dishes. Sago, the starch from palm pith, was the older thickener and was steadily displaced in American kitchens by cassava tapioca over the same decades, which may account for the way so many recipes of this era name the two interchangeably. The spoonful of claret is a genteel touch of the same sort that put sherry in turtle soup — barely tasted, but expected on a well-set table.