Home › Recipes › Peach and Prune Soup
Peach and Prune Soup
See Prune Soup No.2.
PEACH SOUP No. 2 (Cold) Pare, stone, and chop peaches. Sprinkle over them sugar in quantity desired and let stand an hour. To a pint of juice add one-third pint of claret; place in a jug and cover with ice one hour. Serve with shaved ice in glasses.
A cold macerated-fruit drink more than a soup, and the whole thing depends on getting real juice out of the peaches rather than pulp. The book's cross-reference to Prune Soup No. 2 is for the prune version; what follows here stands on its own.
- The hinge: maceration, not cookingNothing is heated. The sugar draws juice from the chopped fruit over the hour it stands, and that syrupy liquid is the soup. Use ripe, fragrant freestone peaches; underripe fruit will give you sweetened water.
- How many peachesThe recipe never says. An hour's maceration gives only free-run juice, so expect to need several pounds of ripe fruit for a pint, and more if they are firm; the yield is unpredictable. Press the macerated fruit lightly through a sieve if you are short, but do not force the pulp through or the result turns cloudy and thick.
- Sugar "in quantity desired"Start with about 1/2 cup per 2 lb of fruit and adjust. The claret is dry and will pull the sweetness down, so the juice should taste slightly sweeter than you want the finished glass to be.
- ClaretIn American books of this period claret means a dry red Bordeaux or a domestic wine made in that style. Any dry, unoaked red will do; avoid anything jammy or high in alcohol, which fights the fruit.
- A jug, and "cover with ice"A jug is a pitcher. Covering it with ice means packing it in an ice bath for an hour, the pre-refrigeration way of chilling a liquid hard and fast. Two hours in the refrigerator does the same job.
- Pared peachesParing means taking the skin off with a knife, which on ripe fruit wastes a good deal of the flesh that should be making juice. Easier: cut a shallow X in the base, drop into boiling water for 30 to 45 seconds, then into ice water, and the skins slip off.
- Shaved ice at the tableIt looks well but dilutes quickly. Chill the glasses instead and add only a small spoonful of shaved ice as the soup goes out.
- YieldA pint of juice with a third of a pint of claret makes about 1 1/3 pints, or four small glasses as a first course or a hot-weather sweet.
Cold fruit soups reached American cookbooks in part by way of German and Scandinavian practice, where Kaltschale and similar dishes of fruit, sugar and wine were long-standing summer fare, and such recipes became more common in English-language collections through the late nineteenth century. The form suited the moment: commercial ice had become cheap and widely delivered in American cities, and a recipe could reasonably assume a household could pack a jug in ice for an hour and shave more for the glasses. Claret was the ordinary term for dry red Bordeaux and, by extension, for domestic wines made in that style, and it turns up regularly in period fruit desserts and cups. The clipped cross-reference at the top and the numbering suggest a book working through variations in sequence, with the same method repeated and the fruit swapped out.