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Red Raspberry Soup
Add one pound granulated sugar to two quarts of red raspberries well looked over and mashed. Let stand an hour, then put through sieve. Heat gradually, stirring carefully, and when at boiling point add a tablespoon of cornstarch which has been dissolved in just a little cold water. When clear, smooth, and thickened add a halfpint of sherry, remove at once and let cool. When ready to serve pour it over shaved ice in glasses.
A cold fruit soup that reads more like a chilled drink than a course. It is simple, but the sugar ratio and the thickening step both need attention.
- Quantities in modern termsTwo quarts of red raspberries is roughly 2.5 to 3 lb (about 1.2 kg to 1.4 kg) of fruit. A half-pint of sherry is one cup; one pound of granulated sugar is about 2 1/4 cups.
- The maceration is not optionalThe hour of standing with sugar draws juice out of the berries by osmosis, which is what makes the mash push through a sieve at all. Skipping it leaves you grinding dry pulp against the mesh.
- SievingUse a fine mesh sieve or a food mill and press hard; raspberry seeds are numerous and unpleasant in a chilled soup. A blender before sieving speeds things up but do not use a juicer, which discards too much pulp.
- SweetnessA pound of sugar to two quarts of berries is very sweet by current taste, and this was meant to be diluted over ice. If you plan to serve it in bowls rather than glasses, start with half the sugar and adjust after sieving.
- The cornstarchOne tablespoon for this volume gives only a light body, just enough to keep the purée from separating. Slurry it in cold water, add it to the liquid at a bare boil, and hold it there a minute or two until it turns from cloudy to clear — undercooked cornstarch tastes chalky.
- Add the sherry off the heatAdd the sherry last -- "remove at once" is the hinge: the recipe puts the sherry in and takes the pan straight off. The sherry is there for aroma, and prolonged heat drives off both the alcohol and the volatile notes that justify it. A medium or cream sherry suits the sweetness; a dry fino will taste thin here.
- Chilling and servingCool, then refrigerate at least four hours — raspberry flavour reads flat at room temperature. Shaved ice in the glass was the period presentation; it dilutes as it melts, which the heavy sugaring accounts for.
- YieldRoughly a quart and a half to two quarts of finished soup, depending on how hard you press the sieve; six to ten glasses, or fewer if served in bowls as a course.
Cold fruit soups came into American cookbooks largely by way of Central and Northern Europe, where sweet soups of cherries, plums or berries were served as a summer first course or as dessert; Scandinavian and German-speaking households ate them before they appeared in English-language collections. The sherry and the shaved ice suggest a genteel American table of the later nineteenth or early twentieth century: commercial ice was cheap and widely delivered by then, and fortified wine in a chilled sweet was a familiar touch, the same impulse that put sherry in trifles and consomm he thickening. Cornstarch rather than arrowroot or egg yolk also fits that period, corn starch having become an inexpensive pantry staple in American kitchens through the second half of the nineteenth century.