Grape Soup
Allow a half pint of sugar to a pint of water and simmer clear before adding a quart of grape juice (Press ripe grapes through a sieve) and juice of a lemon. Have softened a tablespoon of tapioca and simmer till clear with the juice. Remove and serve hot or cold; for the latter cooling and adding shaved ice.
A fruit soup thickened lightly with tapioca, meant to open a meal rather than close it. The measurements are all by volume, in the old style, and the tapioca is the one thing that needs attention.
- The measuresA half pint of sugar is 1 cup, and a pint of water is 2 cups. That syrup is on the sweet side for a modern palate with sweetened bottled juice; if you press your own grapes, taste before committing to the full cup.
- "Simmer clear"This means simmering the sugar and water until the syrup loses its cloudiness, a matter of a few minutes at a bare bubble once the sugar has dissolved. It is not a caramel stage and should take no colour.
- The tapiocaA tablespoon of tapioca here means small pearl tapioca, which must be soaked in cold water until the grains swell and soften, half an hour at least, before it goes into the juice. Quick-cooking (minute) tapioca can be substituted straight from the box, but use no more than a tablespoon or the soup sets rather than pours.
- Cook it clear, then stopThe hinge of the dish: the tapioca is done when the pearls turn from opaque white to translucent, and not before. Undercooked pearls stay chalky in the middle; pushed too long over heat the grape juice dulls and turns brownish and loses its fresh flavour.
- Pressing the grapes"Press ripe grapes through a sieve" gives raw juice with skins and seeds held back. Slip-skin grapes such as Concord suit this kind of recipe; heating the grapes briefly before sieving extracts more juice and colour. Reckon on something like 3 to 4 lb of grapes for a quart of juice, and more if you press them raw.
- The lemonNot optional. Grape juice alone reads flat and syrupy hot; the lemon is what makes it taste like soup and not like dessert sauce.
- Yield and servingSomething over a quart and a half, six cups or so. Served hot it is a first course; chilled with shaved ice it belongs with the summer luncheon soups, and a spoonful of whipped cream or plain sour cream on top suits the dish.
Sweet fruit soups thickened with sago, tapioca or arrowroot came into American cookbooks in the late nineteenth century, often said to have arrived by way of German and Scandinavian households, where cold cherry, plum and berry soups were long established as a summer dish. The American version leaned on the grape because of the Concord, generally traced to Ephraim Wales Bull's vine in Concord, Massachusetts, in the late 1840s: hardy, heavy-bearing and intensely perfumed, it spread through northern gardens and made a glut of grapes an autumn commonplace. Cookbooks of this period worked hard to find uses beyond jelly and juice, and a soup that could be sent to the table hot in October or over shaved ice in August solved two problems with one kettle.