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Fruit Soup
1 pint (2 cups) fruit juice 2 quarts (8 cups) water 6 cloves 3 inches cinnamon stick Peel of I orange Peel of I lemon 4 bitter almonds 1/4 lb. (1/2 cup) tapioca 3 heaping tablespoonfuls (3 ozs.) sugar 1 teaspoonful salt
This is one of the entries in the book that gives quantities only, with the method left to the general instructions for casserole cookery. It also calls for an ingredient that is no longer sold or used as food in the United States.
- Bitter almondsThe four bitter almonds are the problem. Bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernels are crushed, chewed or steeped in liquid; raw ones cannot legally be sold as food in the U.S. and the toxic dose for a child is small. There is no safe quantity to substitute by eye here, and the flavouring is the whole point of their inclusion, so use a current fruit soup recipe rather than adapting this one.
- Why old books used themBitter almonds were a standard source of the marzipan-and-cherry note that commercial almond extract now supplies as benzaldehyde, whether synthesised or distilled from kernels. Recipes of the period called for a few kernels as a flavouring in much the way they called for a bay leaf.
- "Casserole" in this bookThe term refers to the earthenware or fireproof glass vessel that could go on the stovetop as well as in the oven. Nothing on this page gives a method, so the cooking is presumably simmering rather than baking; read "casserole" here as "pot".
- The tapiocaA quarter pound of tapioca here means pearl or granulated tapioca rather than the instant flakes sold now, and it was expected to soak and swell into the liquid as a thickener. Instant tapioca by the same weight is precooked and will thicken faster and more heavily.
- ProportionsTwo cups of juice to eight cups of water is a thin, barely sweet liquid by modern taste, sweetened with only three ounces of sugar. Fruit soups of this period were often served tart and light, hot or chilled, as a course in their own right rather than as a rich dessert.
- YieldTen cups of liquid before the tapioca swells, so roughly eight to ten servings.
Fruit soup belongs to the Northern and Central European table rather than the Anglo-American one: the Scandinavian fruktsoppa and the German and Jewish sweet-sour fruit soups were all built on dried or fresh fruit, water, a spice stick, citrus peel and a starch to give body, and were served hot in winter or chilled in summer. Its appearance in an American casserole-cookery book reflects the early twentieth-century enthusiasm for fireproof earthenware and glass dishes, which were sold as vessels that would go from range to oven to table. The bitter almonds are the period marker: until commercial almond extract became cheap and universal, a few kernels steeped in the liquid were the ordinary way to get that flavour.