“There were great joints of aurochs roasted with leeks, venison pies chunky with carrots, bacon, and mushrooms, mutton chops sauced in honey and cloves, savory duck, peppered boar, goose, skewers of pigeon and capon, beef-and-barley stew, cold fruit soup.” -A Clash of Kings
Medieval Cold Fruit Soup
Our Thoughts:
On first taste, the medieval soup comes across with just a strong honey taste. The color tells one’s brain to expect a different flavor, a strawberry, perhaps, but once over that initial surprise, you can begin to really appreciate it for its own merits. With a little cinnamon on top, the soup reminded us of a candied apple, yet the almond milk lends it just a bit of exoticness.
This recipe, along with the modern version, is available in the Cookbook.
Hey! I absolutely love all of your blogs. They brighten my day, and make me want to cook. I really like the looks of this recipe, but i’m trying this health lifestyle known as Paleo/Hunter-gatherer. Basically, it means you can’t eat grains or dairy. I was wondering if there’s maybe a way to make this recipe without the cream – something made by a fruit or veggie that aids to counterbalance the tartness?
You might try adding some honey. The sweetness of that ought to counter some of the tartness of the fruit soup. You can also feel free to tweak the proportions of ingredients to suit your taste.
Okay, sooo… A few comments on this recipe!
I really would have liked to have made the modern version of this, and merrily skipped out out to buy all the ingredients…
…except passion fruit.
As it turns out, you can’t get passion fruit ANYWHERE in the Raleigh area. Mango, guava, starfruit, kiwi — you can find that stuff in abundance, but no frigging passion fruit! I tried Harris Teeter, Whole Foods, Fresh Market, Trader Joe’s… I even scoped out a few ethnic food places, but to no avail. I realize you can order them online, but obviously that requires a bit more advance planning! If you all could offer an alternative, that would be great.
So at that point, I had all this fruit and no clue what to do with it. :P
I went ahead and started on the medieval recipe — but only after bumming some saffron off a friend (I knew it was expensive, but not $20-a-bottle expensive!), because I’d promised my viewing party cold fruit soup and damn it, I was going to make cold fruit soup. ;> But there were a few snags there, too…
Your recipe doesn’t specify whether we should use sweetened or unsweetened almond milk. I went ahead and grabbed unsweetened, and discovered that by itself, it tastes like chalk — but it was fine after adding it to the apples and honey and stuff. Which did you all use?
After I had the pot of soup simmering along, I tasted a bit, and let my boyfriend taste a bit too. We both agreed that it just kind of tasted like sweetened apple sauce, and that it sort of wanted something else. I kicked in a full stick of cinnamon and a bit more honey and saffron, but it wasn’t quite enough.
Then I remembered I had all this damn fruit!
What I ended up doing was blending eight strawberries with a few glugs of almond milk and honey, then adding those to the soup. They added that lovely pink color (I couldn’t find Sandalwood on short notice and didn’t have any food coloring handy), and bulked up the soup’s volume and texture very very nicely. And as a wonderful summer fruit that grows here in North Carolina like /gangbusters/, I thought it was also very seasonal. I served it with a slice of apple and cinnamon-sugar sprinkled over the whole shebang.
It would be nice if future recipes might include suggested serving sizes. Two apples probably would have been enough to serve two or three people, but I was serving six; after I added all the strawberries and extra almond milk and so on, I had just enough soup to serve a bit more than a ladleful to everyone. I love love LOVE your recipes, and my viewing party uses them all the time, but we are often left to estimate serving sizes and some guidance on that front would be extra helpful. :>
We will certainly try to include estimated serving sizes going forward!
In the future, actual passionfruit could be substituted with just passionfruit juice, which is essentially what the recipe ends up using.
We used unsweetened almond milk, and I, too, think it’s a horrid substitute for cow’s milk and will forever feel sorry for the people that can’t enjoy milk of the cow and have to rely on the milk of a nut….That said, the almond milk gave the soup a more savory flavor. We thought it pretty much tasted like applesauce, too, and ended up adding some of the famous Vietnamese Cinnamon :)
The great thing about recipes like this is you can do like you did, and just keep adding fruit until you like it!
Oooh — see, my friends totally bought some of that Vietnamese cinnamon, too! I wish I’d thought to borrow that while I was borrowing saffron. I also wonder what would have happened if I’d added a bit of actual milk or even half-and-half.
I couldn’t even find passion fruit JUICE, or passion fruit in a can, or any permutation of passion fruit whatsoever. It was very, very frustrating, especially when you’re driving around in 95 degree weather in a car with no air conditioning! I eventually had to just take my first load of groceries home and go back out to search for medieval soup ingredients later.
It might be worthwhile to put a bit of a disclaimer on recipes with expensive, unusual, or hard-to-find ingredients, for us shoestring budget novices who aren’t sure what to substitute with which. For example — I’d love to try your persimmon and shrimp recipe, but I’ve never actually EATEN a persimmon. What do they taste like? What should I look for when choosing them? If I can’t find them, could I use something else instead?
But maybe those are just questions for Google, or my mother. :P
I rely on my mother for a whole swath of cooking advice, but she wouldn’t know what a persimmon looks like :) The Chilean ones are in season now, and we’ve been consistently finding ours at the local Whole Foods. You want to choose the most orange ones, and they should be firm, never soft. Their color fades to grey-ish or green-ish orange when they are going by. Their flavor is kind of a savory-sweet, not too sweet, with a firm tomato (not the gooey seed part) texture.
I have wild persimmon trees. But I rarely get to eat them. It takes frost to make them change from mouth puckering astringent chemical taste to that sweet creamy almost cooked buttered pumpkin taste. I am just far enough south to not have reliable frost at the right time. I have tried freezing them to no avail. My sheep who can stand the high tannins in the ripe but unfrosted fruit usually get to eat them. But since you can cook the tannins out of acorns maybe I will try cooking them out of the persimmons this fall.
Oh! Last thought, then I’ll shut up: I didn’t have a clue which kind of apples I ought to be using. I assumed it was another personal preference thing; generally, I like red delicious apples, but I thought those would be TOO sweet, so I think I went with a couple of galas. What did you all use?
We actually used Galas, too! They were on sale…
Red delicious are usually not great for cooking because of their texture, and they sometimes lose their flavor quickly.
That was about what I figured, though they are damn good eatin’ just on their own. Glad I made the right choice!
Re: persimmon: that’s very helpful advice! Thank you! :D