Appears in
Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets

By Darra Goldstein

Published 2015

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soup with a sweet taste is generally made from berries and other fruits. Traditionally, such soups were prepared mostly by poor people, who used what they harvested in their small gardens or collected in nearby woods. They even dried the ingredients in order to make soup throughout the year (as in Scandinavian rose hip soup). Sweet soups were often prepared for invalids as a light yet nutritious meal. Only the wealthy could afford to season sweet soups with sugar; otherwise the soups relied on the intrinsic sweetness of the fruits, or sometimes the addition of honey.