eliza acton's apple soup

 It's been such a long time since I last posted any recipes or things like that, so here's something of the kind but something different at the same time. Yes, you read right; apple soup. Yes, it's a savoury soup made of apples. It is as strange as it sounds, but it also tastes quite good! I had this with my mum quite a while ago, and although for me it's definitely something I'm not used to (le mother seemed to really like it!) I think I will be making this again. Before writing this I did a bit of research on le internet, and I found soups with apples in them, but used only together with other ingredients, like broccoli or carrot, to add some extra flavour. So if you fancy being brave and trying something new, this would be the perfect thing. The recipe is from one of my favourite cook books at my mum's place, and it suggests serving the soup with rice. I don't know if you're meant to have it separately or put it in the soup, so we had rice in a gravy boat, haha! And we also had Karelian rice pasties because we were in Finland and I love a good Karelian rice pasty. It's also suggested on a menu list for May, so now's pretty much the best time to try and eat this lil' soup.

 This is how you make it:

~340g (cooking) apples
2 pints beef/mutton/vegetable stock
½ teaspoon ground ginger
Salt and pepper
4 tablespoons (long grain) rice

If you've actually made a proper stock, remove any fat from the surface. Wash the apples and chop them roughly, without removing peel or core. Bring the stock to the boil in a large pan, add the apples and cover the pan with a lid. Simmer the soup over low heat until the apples are tender. Pour the soup through a sieve, but try to get as much of the pulp as possible through as well. (I suppose, as the book is from the 70s, you could now actually just remove the core of the apple and then use a food processor, a blender or something like that at this point, I just wasn't that clever when I was making this, haha!) Stir in the ginger and season with salt and ground pepper. Re-heat the soup and remove any scum. (What a nasty-sounding word, but you know, all the foam &c. And again if you use modern kitchen appliances, this might not be necessary..) While the soup is cooking, boil the rice in plenty of salted water. Drain thoroughly and keep the rice warm. Spoon the soup into bowls, and serve the rice separately.

Hope you like it if you ever decide to give this a go!