Home › Cooking Hints and Recipes › Fruit Soup
Fruit Soup
2 cups red currants
Sugar
2 cups red raspberries
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 pint of cold water
¼ cup cold water
1 orange (juice)
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon grated orange peel
Pick over and wash the berries, place in kettle and add cold water. Bring slowly to boil; let boil five minutes; strain, add the orange juice and grated orange peel and sweeten to taste; add nutmeg; moisten the cornstarch with ¼ cup of cold water, add to juice slowly. Return to fire. After reaching boiling point, boil five minutes, stirring constantly. Serve hot or cold with a tablespoon of whipped cream on each serving.
Other berries in season may be substituted for the currants and red raspberries. Cherries and pineapple are a good combination.
A straightforward fruit soup thickened with cornstarch. The original leaves sugar to taste and gives no yield, so both need judgment.
- The hinge: cook the cornstarch outThe instruction to boil five minutes while stirring constantly is not padding. Cornstarch reaches full thickness at the boil, and a shorter cook leaves a raw, chalky taste that is very obvious in a cold fruit dish.
- How much sugarRed currants are sharply acidic. Figure on ⅓ to ½ cup of sugar for this quantity of fruit, added after straining so you can taste the actual juice rather than guess.
- StrainingA fine sieve pressed with the back of a ladle gives a clear, glossy soup; a food mill or coarse strainer pushes through pulp and seeds and makes something closer to a puree. Either works, but decide before you thicken.
- CurrantsFresh red currants are seasonal and scarce in most American markets, since cultivation was restricted for much of the twentieth century over white pine blister rust. Frozen currants work; dried Zante currants are a different thing entirely (they are grapes) and will not do.
- Cornstarch quantityTwo tablespoons to roughly a quart of liquid gives a light, pourable soup that just coats a spoon. If you want it thicker for serving cold, note that cornstarch sets up further as it chills.
- Nutmeg and orange peelGrate both fresh. A quarter teaspoon of nutmeg from a jar that has been open a year contributes nothing; from a whole nutmeg it is assertive against the fruit.
- Yield and servingAbout four to six cups, serving four to six as a first course or a light dessert. Served cold it wants to be properly cold, several hours in the refrigerator, with the whipped cream added at the table so it does not sink.
Fruit soups belong to a northern and central European tradition — Scandinavian, German, Polish, Hungarian — where cooked-down berries or dried fruit, thickened with starch and often finished with cream, were served hot in winter and cold in summer, sometimes as a first course and sometimes as dessert. Such soups appear in American cookbooks of the early twentieth century, and immigrant kitchens along with the era's taste for light, cooling summer menus are plausible routes, though the recipe itself says nothing of its origins. Currants and raspberries overlap in season, and both were common in backyard gardens before commercial fruit distribution flattened the seasons. The book's closing note that cherries and pineapple make a good combination is a reminder of how these recipes actually functioned: a formula for a technique, to be filled in with whatever the garden or the market had that week.