Apple Soup
Pare and stew 8 fine apples in 1/2 pint of water. Add sugar to taste, press through a sieve, flavor with lemon juice and nutmeg and add a tablespoonful of cornstarch. Cook about ten minutes, add, when cool, 1 pint of white wine or cider, and pour it over 4 apples, sliced and cooked in syrup.
A cold fruit soup of the northern European kind, thickened lightly and finished with wine. The instructions assume a cook who already knows fruit soups, so the sequence needs a little unpacking.
- The measuresHalf a pint of water is one cup; a pint of wine is two cups. Eight "fine" apples means eight good-sized apples, and a further four for the garnish, so budget twelve in all.
- Cornstarch needs a slurryStirring dry cornstarch into hot sieved apple gives lumps. Slake the tablespoonful in a little cold water first, then stir it into the simmering purée; the ten minutes of cooking is there to lose the raw starch taste.
- Why the wine goes in coldThe instruction "add, when cool" is the hinge. Boiling the wine drives off both the alcohol and the fresh fruit character the soup depends on, and a hot acidic addition can thin an already-thickened starch. Let the purée come down to room temperature first.
- Apples to useA cooking apple that breaks down — Bramley, McIntosh, a soft russet — gives the purée body. The four sliced apples for the garnish should be the opposite: a firm variety that holds its shape when poached.
- Cooked in syrupNo syrup is specified. A light one, roughly equal parts sugar and water, simmered until the slices are translucent but intact, will answer. Cool the slices in their syrup.
- Sweetness and acidSugar "to taste" depends entirely on the wine. A dry white needs more sugar than a sweet cider; taste after the wine is in, not before, and use the lemon juice to keep it from going flat.
- Serving and yieldThis is served cold, usually as a first course in the older European manner or as a dessert soup. The quantities give four to six portions; the sliced apples go in the bowl and the purée is poured over.
Fruit soups belong to the cooking of northern and central Europe — Scandinavian, German, Polish, Hungarian — where cold or barely warm soups of apple, cherry or plum, thickened with starch and sharpened with wine, appear as a course in their own right rather than as a dessert. Such dishes turn up in English-language cookbooks that gathered recipes from abroad for American and British households curious about how other countries ate, and a title like With a Saucepan Over the Sea declares that intention outright. The cornstarch may be a domestic touch, where a German or Danish cook of the same period might have reached for potato flour or arrowroot.