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Cold Fruit Soups
Cold fruit soups may be made from all kinds of summer fruits by stewing the fruit until tender, pressing through a sieve, adding an equal quantity of water and enough sugar to have slightly acid. Returning to the fire add a slight thickening of arrowroot-1 teaspoonful to the pint-cook until clear, set away and serve very cold.
This is a method rather than a fixed recipe, and it works with almost any soft summer fruit. The one thing to watch is the arrowroot, which behaves nothing like flour or cornstarch.
- Arrowroot proportionsOne teaspoon per pint is about 3 grams to 475 ml — a very light body, closer to a nectar than a pudding. Slurry it in a little cold water or fruit juice first, then stir it into the hot purée.
- Do not boil the arrowroot"Cook until clear" happens within 30 seconds to a minute of the liquid reaching a simmer. Held at a boil or stirred hard afterward, arrowroot breaks down and the soup thins out again and can turn slimy. Pull it off the heat as soon as it clears.
- "Enough sugar to have slightly acid"Sweeten until the fruit tastes rounded but still tart — the sourness is the point of a cold fruit soup. Start with 2 to 3 tablespoons per pint of diluted purée and taste warm, since chilling mutes sweetness noticeably. Expect to want a little more than you think once cold.
- Which fruitsCherries, red or black currants, gooseberries, raspberries, plums and rhubarb stalks all suit this treatment because they have acid to spare. Very sweet, low-acid fruit such as ripe melon or banana will taste flat; a squeeze of lemon corrects it.
- Pressing through a sieveA food mill or a fine mesh sieve with a ladle does the work of the period's hair sieve. Stone fruit should be pitted before stewing; berry seeds and currant skins are exactly what the sieve is there to remove.
- Stewing the fruitUse only a splash of water in the pan — enough to keep the fruit from catching before its own juice runs. Ten to fifteen minutes covered is plenty for berries and currants, a little longer for plums.
- Serving coldChill at least four hours, and cover the surface, as fruit pur iches pick up refrigerator smells. Sour cream, a spoonful of cream, or a dry rusk or sponge finger on the side are the usual accompaniments in the Central European tradition; yogurt is a modern substitution.
- YieldA pound of juicy fruit gives something approaching a pint of pur e, rather less for seedy berries and currants once the sieve has taken the pips and skins, so roughly a quart of finished soup after the equal quantity of water is added — about four small servings as a first course.
Cold fruit soups are associated chiefly with Central and Eastern Europe — Hungarian hideg gy mm lcsleves, Polish and Scandinavian cherry and currant soups, the German Kaltschale — and they appear in English-language cookbooks from the later nineteenth century, though the route by which they arrived is not documented. They make practical sense where fruit is cheapest and most abundant, including windfalls and slightly overripe fruit that would not do for preserving, and they need no meat stock and no long fuel-burning simmer. Arrowroot, milled from the rhizome of Maranta arundinacea and imported chiefly from the West Indies, was a favoured thickener where clarity mattered, since it sets a glossy, near-transparent gel where wheat flour would cloud the fruit color and add a raw, pasty taste to a dish served cold.