Home › Soup Stock › Russian Julienne Soup
Russian Julienne Soup
Cut 1 onion, 1 carrot, 1 turnip, a celery root, and 1 leek into dice. Shred 1 onion and 1 small cabbage. Cut also enough mushrooms to equal the whole of the other vegetables. Fry in a saucepan the leeks and onions in a little butter, taking care that they do not color. Put in all the other vegetables and the mushrooms, and cook gently until the moisture of the mushrooms is drawn out. Pour over enough rich broth to nearly cover, and cook until quite thick; pour over 3 quarts of boiling broth and simmer for an hour longer, adding salt and pepper to taste, and a little finely minced fennel. Now strain in sour cream enough to thicken, stirring briskly.
To be strictly Russian, this soup requires to be served accompanied by meat patties, rissoles, or croquettes.
A vegetable soup built in two stages: a slow sweat that concentrates the mushrooms, then a long simmer in broth finished with sour cream. The finish is where it succeeds or fails.
- The sour cream is the hingeTake the pot off the boil, thin the cream with a ladle or two of hot soup, then whisk it back in over low heat and do not let it boil again. Full-fat sour cream (18 percent or more) holds; low-fat sour cream will break into curds.
- "Strain in"This most likely means pressing the sour cream through a fine sieve into the soup rather than straining the soup itself, breaking up lumps so the cream disperses evenly; a whisk does the same job.
- Julienne means the knife workDespite the instruction to dice, a julienne soup is cut in matchsticks roughly 1/8 inch square and 1 1/2 inches long. Cut everything to the same size so it cooks evenly and looks the part.
- Mushrooms in quantityEqual to all the other vegetables combined is a large amount. Cremini or a proportion of dried porcini, soaked and their liquor added, may come nearer the Russian original than white button mushrooms.
- Celery rootCeleriac, not celery stalks. One small root, peeled hard to remove the fibrous skin.
- The two broth additionsThe first pour barely covers and is reduced to a thick, glazy mass; this is what concentrates the flavour. Only then do the 3 quarts go in. Skipping the reduction gives a thin, watery soup.
- Fennel or dillDill is the herb Russian kitchens reach for, and the two feathery herbs were sometimes confused. Either works; add it in the last few minutes so it keeps its scent.
- Yield and serviceThree quarts of broth plus the vegetables serves eight to ten. The meat patties called for are probably pirozhki, served alongside rather than in the bowl.
Julienne soup is a French construction -- vegetables cut in fine strips and simmered in clear broth -- and the name refers to the cut, though its ultimate origin is unclear; by the late nineteenth century it appeared on menus across Europe. The Russian version departs from the French in three ways that this recipe preserves: the heavy load of mushrooms, the sour cream finish, and the accompanying baked or fried meat pastries. Russian and French cooking were deeply entangled in this period, since aristocratic Russian households employed French chefs while French kitchens borrowed Russian service and Russian dishes, and compilations like this one collected the results under national labels. The closing instruction about what makes the soup "strictly Russian" is a reminder that the pastries were understood as part of the dish, not a side; a bowl of soup with pirozhki alongside remains standard practice.