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.
