Cherry Soup
(Berlin.) Trim and stone 1 pint of red cherries, add 1 pint of water, juice and grated rind of a lemon, cinnamon, sugar to taste, and 3 tablespoonfuls of wine or cordial, claret is the best. Cook until done and serve, hot or very cold, with a plate of buttered toast. It will take about half an hour to cook, mashing the fruit well. These fruit and wine soups are favorite hot weather fare in Austria and Germany.
A German Kirschsuppe reduced to its essentials. The instructions are loose by design, so the decisions left to the cook are worth spelling out.
- Cherries and quantityA pint of stoned red cherries is about 2 cups, roughly 11-12 oz. "Red cherries" most likely means sour cherries (Morello, Montmorency), which give the sharpness the sugar is there to balance; sweet Bings make a flatter soup and need less sugar and more lemon.
- Sugar to tasteWith sour cherries start at 1/3 cup and adjust after the fruit has broken down, since cooking concentrates the acid. Add it early enough to dissolve fully but taste at the end, when the volume has settled.
- CinnamonUse one stick rather than ground, and fish it out before serving. Ground cinnamon clouds the liquid and settles into grit at the bottom of the bowl.
- Lemon rindGrate only the yellow zest. Pith simmered for half an hour turns the soup bitter in a way the sugar cannot cover.
- The wineThree tablespoons of claret means a dry red Bordeaux-style wine. Stir it in at the end, off the heat, if you want the wine to read as wine; added at the start it simply cooks away. A cherry cordial or kirsch works the same way.
- Cooking time and textureHalf an hour at a bare simmer, mashing as you go, breaks the fruit down but leaves the soup thin. Many German versions thicken it with a slurry of cornstarch or potato starch, about 2 teaspoons in cold water, stirred in for the last minute; the original leaves it unthickened.
- ServingYields about 3 cups, two generous or four small servings. Served very cold it wants a little more sugar and lemon than it does hot, since chilling mutes both. The buttered toast is the intended accompaniment and is better than it sounds against the sour fruit.
Fruit soups belong to a north and central European tradition in which sweet-sour liquids are eaten as a course rather than a dessert, and cherry soup in particular is associated with Germany, Austria and Hungary, where the sour Morello is a garden staple. The Berlin attribution here may suggest something of the book's method: recipes apparently collected from cities abroad and reported back in American measures for American cooks, who would likely have found the idea of a wine-laced fruit soup served cold in summer thoroughly foreign. The note that these are "favorite hot weather fare" is doing the persuading. Hungarian meggyleves, the best-known relative, is usually enriched with sour cream, while the Berlin version stays lean and leans on the claret and lemon instead.