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Cherry Soup
Pit 1 quart fresh cherries, add 1/2 teaspoon salt and 3 tablespoons sugar. Cover with 1 quart water and cook 15 minutes. Serve hot, cold or lukewarm.
A three-line camp soup that depends almost entirely on which cherries go into the pot. The written proportions suit sour cherries; sweet ones need adjustment.
- Which cherryThe sparse sugar here — three tablespoons to a quart of fruit and a quart of water — suits tart cherries such as Montmorency or morello. With sweet Bings or Rainiers the result is likely to taste flat; lemon juice or a splash of vinegar will give it an edge.
- QuantitiesA quart of whole cherries is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb, yielding around 3 cups pitted; the recipe does not say whether the quart is measured before or after pitting. The finished soup serves four as a first course or dessert.
- PittingA hand pitter is fastest, but a sturdy drinking straw pushed through the stem end works and is easier to carry outdoors. Save any juice that escapes and add it to the pot.
- Cooking timeFifteen minutes at a simmer will collapse the fruit almost entirely. If you want recognisable cherries in the bowl, pull a cup of them out after five minutes and return them at the end.
- The saltHalf a teaspoon in a quart of liquid reads oddly in a fruit soup but is doing real work — it sharpens the fruit and keeps the sugar from tasting syrupy. Do not leave it out.
- BodyAs written this is fruit in sweetened water, thin by design. Traditional versions thicken with sour cream or a flour-and-cream slurry stirred in off the heat; either turns it into something closer to a dessert.
- ServingCold is the usual choice in hot weather, and the soup improves after a few hours as the liquid takes on colour and the flavours settle. Chill it in the stream or cooler rather than serving straight from the fire.
Cold or lukewarm fruit soups are a Central and Northern European habit that never fully crossed into mainstream American cooking, though they arrived with Hungarian, German and Scandinavian immigrants: Hungarian meggyleves, made with sour cherries and soured cream, is the best-known version, and Danish and Swedish kitchens have their own thickened fruit soups eaten as a light course or a sweet. What makes this one belong in an outdoor cookbook is its economy — cherries, water, salt, sugar and a quarter of an hour over a fire, with no dairy to spoil and no measuring beyond what a camp kit holds. Sour cherries also have a short, glut-heavy season, which is exactly the condition that produces recipes like this one: a way to use a great many of them quickly without baking.