Home › The Principles of Cookery › Russian Cabbage Soup
Russian Cabbage Soup
This ancient Russian national dish--known as schstchi--enjoys an immense reputation. There are many ways of preparing it. The following is one of the best known. Take six or eight white cabbages shredded, half a pound of pearl barley, a quarter of a pound of butter, a handful of salt, and two pounds of mutton, with two quarts of Kvas or broth. The meat having been salted for thirty-six hours is put into a press, then cut into small pieces, and not thrown into the pot till the cabbage has boiled. Some artichokes cut into four are added, and when the whole is dished three spoonfuls of thick cream are poured over it. The soup is sometimes made with oil instead of butter, and with fish instead of meat, usually during the fasts.
The proportions here are copied from a large-household original and the liquid quantity has clearly been abbreviated somewhere along the line. Treat the ingredient list as a ratio to be scaled, not a shopping list.
- The proportions do not balanceSix to eight cabbages against two quarts of liquid is not a soup, it is a braise. For a pot of shchi that behaves like the description, work from one medium white cabbage (about 2 lb), 4 oz pearl barley, 1 lb mutton or lamb and 3 quarts of stock, adding more liquid as the barley swells.
- The saltA handful of salt may well belong to the thirty-six-hour salting of the meat rather than to the pot; the recipe lists it without saying. Salt the finished soup at the end and taste, since salted meat and barley both shift the seasoning as they cook.
- Salting and pressing the meatRub the meat with coarse salt, refrigerate it for the day and a half, then weight it under a plate to expel liquid. Rinse and pat dry before cutting. Do the salting in the refrigerator rather than at room temperature.
- KvasA lightly fermented, faintly sour rye drink, still sold in Eastern European groceries. Here it supplies the sourness characteristic of many versions of shchi, though the recipe itself allows plain broth instead. If you cannot get it, use meat broth with a splash of the brine from sauerkraut or a spoonful of cider vinegar rather than nothing at all.
- MuttonMature sheep, rarely sold in Britain or America now. Lamb shoulder or neck gives the closest result; it wants long simmering, roughly 1.5 to 2 hours, before it will yield.
- Order of cookingThe instruction to hold the meat back until the cabbage has boiled is odd by modern practice and produces tough lamb. Simmer the meat and barley together first, then add the shredded cabbage for the last 30 to 40 minutes so it softens without turning grey.
- ArtichokesPossibly Jerusalem artichokes rather than the globe kind, though the recipe does not say which. Scrub and quarter them and add with the cabbage; they need about 25 minutes.
- The creamRussian shchi is finished with smetana, a thick cultured sour cream. Stir it in off the heat or spoon it into each bowl; boiling it will split it.
- YieldScaled as above, the pot serves six to eight as a main course with dark rye bread.
Shchi (the book's "schstchi" is one of many nineteenth-century attempts at the Cyrillic) is often said to be the oldest continuously eaten dish in the Russian repertoire, traditionally traced back to the arrival of cabbage in the Russian lands around the ninth century, though neither claim is firmly established. It was a peasant soup that rose: proverbs treat it as the measure of a household's wealth, the rich version heavy with meat and the lean version, mentioned here at the end, made with oil and fish for the long Orthodox fasts, of which there are close to two hundred days in the year. It appears in Cassell's as part of the late-Victorian appetite for cataloguing foreign cookery for readers who would probably never make it. What the entry does register is the sourness: real shchi depends on kvas, sauerkraut or brine, though the recipe here offers plain broth as an alternative.