Meggyleves (Chilled Sour Cherry Soup)

Variations

• The habarás method: the older Hungarian way — a tablespoon of flour beaten into the soured cream, let down with the hot soup a little at a time, boiled for a minute and then chilled. It is the second of the two answers the first tip below describes, applied here, and the flour goes in as a stabiliser rather than for taste.
• Stoned: easier to eat, and it loses the aroma the fourth tip is about. A few drops of almond extract will imitate it if you must.
• With sweet cherries: drop the sugar to 40g and raise the lemon to 3 tbsp. It still will not reach the sharpness this soup is built on.
• Other fruit: plums, apricots and redcurrants all take the same treatment. Outside Hungary the cold fruit soup is more often blueberry or strawberry.
• As a dessert: leave it as it is and add whipped cream. In Hungary it is traditionally the first course of a summer dinner rather than the last.

Tips

• The answers for a cold dairy soup are closed at two, and this is the third. Šaltibarščiai sets them out in its own words: "One problem, two answers: stabilise it, or never heat it." Dovga boils, so "an egg and two tablespoons of flour have to be beaten in, putting protein and starch physically between the casein"; šaltibarščiai never heats at all, so being cold is its permission — "Being cold is not this dish's preference". The premise both share and neither states is that the acid and the dairy are in the pot at the same moment. This soup boils with no dairy in it, chills, and takes the cream only once it is cold. It needs no stabiliser and it does not need to stay cold throughout: what separates the two is sequence, not temperature.
• Which makes the instruction in step three to keep the dairy out the load-bearing line. Dairy and heat lists boiling, acid, and salt plus long heat as what splits cream — and this pan genuinely does two of the three: it boils hard, and cherries plus lemon make it sharply acidic. Nothing happens only because the cream is not there for it.
• The cream is let down with the soup, not poured into it. Cold soured cream, cold soup, a ladle at a time until the two are the same thickness, then back into the pan. The motion is the one you use to temper something hot, but the reason is different: here it is the difference in thickness, not heat, that makes lumps.
• Leaving the stones in is half the aroma. Cherry stones give up an almond note into the liquid as it simmers. Black forest cake reaches the same note by distilling it into kirsch; this reaches it with water and time. In exchange you have to warn people.
• Season it cold, always. Šaltibarščiai writes the rule down — "Low temperatures suppress saltiness and sweetness, so anything seasoned lukewarm will taste flat". Here what is being suppressed is not salt but sugar and acid, so the gap is wider. A soup that is pleasantly sweet warm tastes of nothing cold, and sugar added then is too much the next day.
• The colour matters for the same reason. Šaltibarščiai puts it as "In a hot soup that is cosmetic; in a cold one the colour is the dish". The pigment here is anthocyanin and it also holds its red in acid, which is one more reason the lemon is not only for taste.
• Ten minutes of simmering, no more. Burst cherries cloud the liquid and leave nothing to chew. This is a broth with whole fruit in it rather than a purée, and that is what lets one spoonful of cream make three textures in the bowl.