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Tschi, or Russian Soup
Take a pound of nicely-flavoured sausage-meat. Make it into small balls, and fry these until they are slightly browned all over. Drain them from the fat, put them into a soup tureen, and pour over them three pints of boiling soup prepared as follows. Mince two large onions finely, and mix them with a small cabbage finely sliced. Put the whole into a stewpan with a piece of fresh butter the size of a large egg, and turn the vegetables about over a gentle fire until they are nicely browned. Sprinkle over them two ounces of flour, and moisten the whole with three pints of nicely-flavoured stock. Stir the soup over the fire until it boils, season with pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg, and let it simmer gently for half an hour, skimming carefully the whole of the time. Just before serving, put into it a table-spoonful of finely-minced lean ham, a glassful of light wine, and three or four tarragon-leaves finely shredded. Serve very hot. Sufficient for five or six persons. Time, half an hour to simmer the soup.
A Victorian English reading of Russian cabbage soup, thickened with a browned roux and garnished with fried sausage balls. Nothing here is difficult, but a few of the measures need translating and the browning stage decides how the soup tastes.
- The hinge: brown the vegetables properlyThe onion and cabbage need to go well past softening, to a real golden-brown, before the flour goes in. That caramelisation is the only depth the soup has, and rushing it gives a pale, floury broth.
- Butter the size of a large eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. It is enough fat to carry 2 oz of flour, which makes this a fairly substantial roux-thickened soup rather than a clear one.
- Three pintsImperial pints, so roughly 60 fl oz or about 7 US cups of stock, and the same quantity is described as the "boiling soup" poured over the meatballs. Read it as one batch of 3 pints, not six.
- A glassful of light wineA Victorian wineglass is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. Use a dry white; the recipe puts it in just before serving, so it keeps its lift.
- Sausage-meatBulk uncased sausage, not links. Modern breakfast sausage tends to be sweeter and more sage-heavy than the Victorian article is likely to have been; a plain pork sausage, or one seasoned with pepper and mace, sits closer to the intent. Squeeze the meat from casings if you cannot buy it loose.
- SkimmingHalf an hour of continuous skimming probably assumes a fattier stock and coarser flour than we use. With modern stock, skim once or twice as the fat rises and leave it be. Simmer uncovered so the cabbage does not go sulphurous.
- Tarragon and nutmegBoth turn up in Victorian soup seasoning and both are assertive. Three or four tarragon leaves is genuinely all the recipe wants; grate the nutmeg sparingly and taste before adding more.
- Yield and servingFive or six persons, as stated. The meatballs sit in the tureen and the hot soup is poured over them, so they stay firm rather than disintegrating.
Tschi is one of many nineteenth-century English spellings of shchi, the cabbage soup that has been a staple of Russian cooking for centuries and is often said to be the country's oldest surviving dish. Authentic shchi depends on a sour note, most often from sauerkraut, brine or a spoonful of soured cream stirred in at table, and many older Russian versions are thickened lightly or not at all, though flour- or grain-thickened shchi is recorded in some regional traditions. What Cassell's gives instead is the dish as it reached a late-Victorian English kitchen: the sour element gone, a French-style brown roux in its place, wine and nutmeg added, and the whole thing garnished with fried sausage balls. Russian and "Polish" soups appear regularly in British cookbooks of this period, part of a broader appetite for continental names attached to comfortably domesticated recipes, and the result tells you rather more about Victorian soup-making than about a Russian table.