As the days around the holidays get shorter and as the weather outside grows colder, great comfort can be found in seeking out a recipe for a warm and savory soup or a rich fruit pie. But… What if… What if there were a way to somehow combine these two comforts? What if you could take a few things you love and have always relied on about soup and combine them with a few of the very different things that have drawn you to seek sweet refuge in a slice of warm pie?
One afternoon, while searching JSTOR’s archive of primary sources, we found something that made us believe that such a dish might be possible. It was a recipe that had the potential to change the culinary landscape of our holidays forever.
But first, we had to place our soup in its proper historic context (of course we had to). It all started with federal agricultural policy.
Writing in 1977, historian Merrill G. Burlingame argued that “the American Cooperative Extension Service has become the most productive organization for adult education the world has ever seen.” Established by the 1914 Smith-Lever Act, the Cooperative Extension Service drew on agricultural work at land-grant colleges to systematically “diffuse[e] among the people of the United States useful and practical information on subjects relating to agriculture, uses of solar energy with respect to agriculture, home economics, and rural energy.” Burlingame explains that the act formalized education initiatives that had been underway in Montana since the 1890s, which meant that the state was “ready to give support to the national movement, as well as receive support from it” as soon as Congress approved the act. The Montana Extension Service built on its momentum to shape national thinking about farming practices, ranching and land use, and rural living.
Some of the evidence of Montana’s outsize impact on the nation’s agriculture in the 1910s and ’20s can be found in the Montana State University Extension Service Historical Publications available via JSTOR. The collection is replete with (historical) advice about rural living, ranging from suggestions for beautifying the farm home (“the security of the nation is built on its homes”) to instructions for building an incubator for starter cultures (“never try to shorten the coagulation by changing the temperature”) to a plethora of lessons from early 4-H manuals (potato club, garden club, clothing club, breakfast club, and sheep club, to name a few). The collection also includes manuals for prepping school lunches, such as the Cooperative Home Economics Extension Circular “Hot Lunches in Rural Schools,” written by Katherine Jensen in 1915.
“Long, cold winters prevail in Montana and the distance between the school and the home is often very great,” Jensen writes. Most children brought lunch from home, but “this lunch cannot be eaten with any feeling of satisfaction or enjoyment. A cold day and a growing school boy or school girl! Picture the situation!”
Jensen outlines an educational (if highly gendered) program designed to put a hot lunch into the bellies of school children while teaching them home-making skills. She includes an estimated budget, etiquette expectations, and recipes that would solve “the hot lunch problem.” Corn chowder, cream of potato soup, tomato soup, vegetable soup, fruit soup…fruit soup? The editors at JSTOR Daily were intrigued by this last, sweet outlier. The recipe seemed simple enough, so we decided to try it.
And it was simple, though one of us had to go to three grocery stores to find tapioca. One editor discovered that the tapioca really should be dissolved with boiling water at the beginning of the process. Chopped apples cooked more quickly than sliced. One of us added dried apricots to the recipe, and one of us added a quarter cup of sugar; all of us added cinnamon. The result? A fairly thick soup that we all liked, at least according to our text message exchange: “really good” and “honestly I really enjoyed it!” are representative assessments. So far, we’ve eaten the soup with yogurt on top, as a topper on pancakes, mixed into oatmeal, with a side of sharp cheddar, and as filling in a hand pie.
Jensen’s recipe resembles closely the traditional Swedish/Norwegian/Danish fruit soups (fruktsoppa/søtsuppe/sødsuppe) served during the winter. It’s not too surprising that it, like other food and drink, made the long journey from the Scandinavian homelands to the United States. As Knut Oyangen reminds us, while some immigrants “accepted the need for flexibility, adjustment, and innovation” when it came to eating in America, others held on to their cultural preferences, out of habit, homesickness, or cultural pride.
When it comes to fruit soup, we can see why the love for it would persist: it’s easy to make, it’s tasty, and it’s warming—all good reasons to track down the tapioca and make some for your own table this winter.
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