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.