Plum Soup
Make with large sweet plums, as for cherry soup, or use part plums and part cherries. (See Fruit Soups, Introductory Recipes.)
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone recipe — the method lives in the book's cherry soup and its introductory fruit-soup notes. What it tells you is the substitution rule, and a few things about plums that cherries do not require.
- The missing instructionsNothing on this page is complete in itself; you need the book's cherry soup and the general fruit-soup directions it points to. Read both before shopping, since the base method determines the thickening, if any.
- Choose the plum for sugar, not size"Large sweet plums" points to sweet dessert varieties such as greengage or Italian prune rather than tart cooking damsons. Italian prune plums are the closest reliable supermarket match; taste before sweetening, as modern plums vary in sugar.
- Skins and stonesPlum skins are tougher and more tannic than cherry skins and do not disappear into the soup. Halve and stone the fruit, simmer until collapsed, then press through a sieve or food mill; if you leave the skins in, expect a slightly astringent, flecked result.
- Acidity balancePlums carry more malic acid than sweet cherries, so a soup made pound-for-pound on the cherry formula will taste sharper. Add sugar in stages at the end rather than at the start, and a strip of lemon peel does more for plums than for cherries.
- The plum-and-cherry mixThe recipe allows part plums and part cherries without fixing the proportion; the mixed version is the more forgiving one.
- Hot or coldFruit soups of this era were served either warm as a first course or chilled as a light dessert course, often with a spoonful of sweetened cream or sour cream, or with small dry cookies or zwieback. Chilled soup will taste less sweet than it did warm, so sweeten after cooling.
- YieldThe original gives none. As a rule, 2 lb of stoned plums with water or thin syrup to cover yields roughly 6 cups of finished soup, enough for four to six as a first course.
Fruit soups belong to central and northern European cooking — the German Pflaumensuppe and Kaltschale, the Scandinavian fruit soups, the Hungarian and Polish chilled cherry soups — and they appear in American cookbooks from the later nineteenth century, often by way of German-American households. Once the cherry soup is written down, the plum, apricot and berry versions are just notes on substitution. Plums were an obvious candidate, since they are highly perishable and had to be used or preserved soon after picking.