La What Now?


Since the 1960s, baseball teams and players have been publishing cookbooks. I collect them and try out some of the recipes that major leaguers have shared with their fans over the years. Photos, recipes and comments included.



Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Strawberry Soup by Floyd Sageser - from "Royals' Recipes: World Series Style" (1980)




RECIPE

3 cups ripe strawberries, washed and hulled
juice of 1 lemon
1/4 cup dry white wine
1/4 cup dry sherry
1 cup cake crumbs or diced pound cake
1/2 tsp. ground ginger
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
pinch of cloves
1 cup white cream

Place cleaned fruit and lemon juice in saucepan.  Add wine and sherry.  Bring to boil.  Simmer on low heat until fruit is soft; cool.

Pour fruit and liquid into blender (may need to make two batches).  Add cake crumbs and spice.  Puree on low speed until smooth.

Pour into a serving bowl.  Stir in cream.  Chill well.  Serve in chilled bowl with strawberry as garnish.  










It's strawberry season, which makes this the perfect time to try this cold soup as a starter or even as a dessert.

This recipe was submitted for the Kansas City Royals' 1980 cookbook by season ticket holder Floyd Sageser, one of the club's super-fans.  The book contains an entire chapter of recipes submitted by Royals boosters.

Hulling strawberries is not as daunting as it sounds.  A paring knife and five minutes, and you're ready to go.  You end up blitzing this soup with a blender anyway, so you might be able to cheat on the hulling.

The cooking segment of the recipe takes only a few minutes once the strawberries are in a boil.  They softened pretty quickly, allowing the rest of the process to follow quickly.

Once the soup was fully chilled (after a few hours or overnight), I served it up in ramekins.  The result was tart, not sweet.  I even added some white sugar before the blender step, and the soup still turned out more tart than sweet.  If you need to sweeten it further, you could set a little pillow of whipped cream on top before finishing with a whole strawberry or two.

A nice cooling treat for the summer.  Try this out while fresh strawberries are still out there in abundance.