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Dried Fruit Soup
1 cup dried apricots 1 cup prunes 1 quart cold water Sugar to taste Wash the fruit perfectly clean. Cook in the water until very soft. Strain, and press out all the juice; sweeten to taste.
Thicken with a tablespoon of rice flour to one quart of liquid. Cook twenty minutes to remove the raw taste of the flour.
A Scandinavian-style fruit soup reduced to its essentials. The single instruction that matters is the last one: the rice flour must cook the full twenty minutes or the soup tastes chalky.
- Soak firstCooking time -- Older dried fruit was generally drier and harder than today's semi-moist supermarket apricots and prunes, which may soften in 20-30 minutes of simmering. The recipe sets no time, only "until very soft": judge by texture, not the clock.
- StrainingPressing out all the juice through a sieve gives the thin, clear soup intended here. If you would rather not discard the pulp, push it through the sieve as well and use less thickener, since the purée thickens on its own.
- Rice flourOne tablespoon per quart is a light body, not a pudding. Slake it in a few tablespoons of cold liquid before adding it to the hot soup, or it will lump. Cornstarch works but sets more glossily and needs only a few minutes; the twenty-minute cook is specific to rice flour.
- Sugar"To taste" is genuinely open here, and depends entirely on the fruit. Start with 2-3 tablespoons per quart and add more once the soup has thickened, since starch mutes sweetness.
- Worth addingA strip of lemon peel, a cinnamon stick or two cloves in the cooking water is traditional in the Northern European versions of this soup and keeps it from tasting flat. The book's stripped-down version leaves it out.
- Yield and servingAbout a quart, serving four as a first course. Serve hot in cold weather or chilled in warm; either way it thickens further as it cools, so thin with a little water if needed.
Sweet fruit soups belong to a Northern and Eastern European tradition — Scandinavian fruktsoppa and its German and Jewish cousins — where dried apricots, prunes and raisins were among the few fruits available through a long winter and were routinely cooked into a thickened liquid, sometimes served hot as a course and sometimes as a dessert or light sweet course. Rice flour or potato starch was often used as the thickener, and sago and tapioca appear in other versions of the same dish.