Name: Grandmother’s Cold Fruit Soup
Yield: Yield: 6–8 servings
Ingredients: ½ cup dried apricots, peaches, pears, or apples, or a mixture, cut into small pieces; 1½ cups (about 9–10 ounces) fresh, ripe strawberries, rinsed, hulled, and halved, or quartered if large, or a mixture of strawberries and raspberries, plus 6–8 strawberry halves or 6–8 raspberries for garnish; 2 cups unsweetened apple-cranberry juice (or a similar, slightly tart fruit juice); 3–4 pounds mixed fresh, ripe, stone fruits, such as peaches, plums, nectarines, apricots, and cherries, peeled if tough-skinned, pitted, and cut into chunks (3–4 cups); 2 cups freshly brewed black tea, such as orange pekoe, Darjeeling, Earl Grey, or English Breakfast; 1 cup pitted prunes, quartered; 1 strip of lemon zest; 1 cup sour cream or yogurt cream, plus additional for garnish (plain yogurt is too watery here); 6–8 fresh mint leaves, for garnish (optional); 1 vanilla bean, split; 2 tablespoons honey, or more as needed; 1 cinnamon stick

Preparation info

Yield:
6–8
servings

Difficulty
Medium

Appears in

The Gefilte Variations

By Jayne Cohen

Published 2000

About

To my grandmother, tiny, first-of-the-year strawberries were the luxury foods of her adopted country, meant to be savored slowly, open-faced on fresh corn-rye bread thickly spread with sweet butter and sprinkled with sugar. Not for her those seasonless behemoths whose hard white hearts you need an apple corer to remove.

Later on, as June warmed and local strawberries grew more plentiful and cheaper at her fruit market, Grandma would serve them with thick sour cream or heavy sweet cr