Cranberry Soup
One pint of cranberries, 1 quart of water, I level tablespoonful of corn-starch, sugar to taste.
Pick over and wash the berries, put them in a saucepan with the water and simmer until soft and broken, then rub through a fine sieve. Return to the fire, add sufficient sugar to sweeten and the corn-starch dissolved in a little cold water. Boil gently for five minutes, then set aside and serve very cold. Pass with it little squares of toasted bread.
A thin, sweetened fruit soup thickened with cornstarch and served chilled — closer to a Scandinavian or Central European fruit soup than to anything on a modern American soup menu. The recipe is straightforward; a few conversions and one judgment call are all it needs.
- MeasuresOne pint of cranberries is 2 cups, roughly 7 oz, a bit over half a standard 12-oz bag. One quart of water is 4 cups. A level tablespoon of cornstarch in a quart of liquid gives a light, barely-clinging body, not a pudding.
- Sugar to tasteCranberries are aggressively tart, and "sugar to taste" here means more than instinct suggests — start around 1/2 cup and taste after the sugar has dissolved. Chilling mutes sweetness, so season the soup slightly sweeter than you want it cold.
- The sieve stepRubbing through a fine sieve removes skins and seeds, which is the whole point of the texture. A food mill or a fine-mesh strainer with a stiff rubber spatula does it faster; a blender alone will not, since it only chops the skins finer.
- Cornstarch handlingSlurry it in a few tablespoons of cold water before it goes in, or it will lump. The five minutes of gentle boiling is deliberate — cornstarch needs to come to a boil to thicken fully and to lose its raw taste — but prolonged hard boiling in an acidic liquid will break the starch down and thin the soup again.
- Cooking the berriesCranberries burst and soften in about 10 minutes. "Simmer until soft and broken" does not need a half hour; long cooking only drives off water and dulls the color.
- ServingChill thoroughly, at least four hours. It will thicken further as it cools, so if it sets too firmly, whisk in a little cold water. Makes about 4 servings as a first course.
- The toast"Little squares of toasted bread" are croutons, passed separately so they stay crisp. Cut them small; the recipe specifies only toasted bread, with no butter mentioned.
Cold sweetened fruit soups thickened with starch are a Northern and Central European tradition — the Scandinavian fruktsoppa, the Polish and German cherry and plum soups — and they turn up in American cookbooks as well. The cranberry, a native North American fruit harvested commercially in Massachusetts and New Jersey from the nineteenth century onward, was an obvious cheap substitute for the imported dried fruits those soups usually called for. A pint of berries, water, a spoonful of starch and some sugar feeds four, and cranberries kept for weeks in a cool cellar without processing. Whether such a dish counted as a soup or a dessert is a question the recipe itself does not settle; served with croutons passed alongside, it can be read as belonging at the front of the meal.