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Tschi, Russian Style
Place in a soup pot a two-pound piece lean beef, half pound smoked bacon, two smoked sausages, one carrot, one onion, two leeks, two branches each celery and parsley. Season with a level tablespoon salt and teaspoon crushed whole black pepper, moisten with four quarts water, and let gently simmer for two and a half hours, being careful to skim off fat once in a while and to keep it at same simmering point from beginning to end.
Thoroughly wash, drain and chop a quarter pound of sauerkraut. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a sautoire, add one finely chopped onion, gently brown for five minutes, then add the sauerkraut and cook for ten minutes, stirring meanwhile. Add three tablespoons flour, stir well while heating for one minute, strain broth through cheesecloth into pan, mix well, pour in one and a half pints water and gently boil for one hour. Cut a piece each of the beef and bacon and the two sausages into very small square pieces, add them to soup with a half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, boil for five minutes, pour soup into tureen and serve.
A long-simmered meat broth finished with soured cabbage and a flour roux. Nothing here is difficult, but the timings assume an afternoon at the stove and the quantities assume a crowd.
- The hinge: keep the simmer bareThe instruction to hold "same simmering point from beginning to end" is the whole technique. A bare tremble for two and a half hours gives clear, sweet broth; a rolling boil emulsifies the bacon fat back in and turns it cloudy and greasy. Skim every twenty minutes or so.
- SautoireA sautoire is a straight-sided shallow pan; a modern wide saucepan or saucier does the job. It has to hold the finished soup, so allow at least four quarts of capacity.
- Straining the brothThe text says to strain the broth into the pan without saying how much. Use all of it; some of the four quarts will have boiled away over the long simmer, and the extra pint and a half of water makes up part of the loss.
- SauerkrautOnly a quarter pound is called for, which is modest for this volume of liquid — the washing and draining is there to pull out brine so the soup tastes of cabbage rather than vinegar. If your kraut is mild, wash it briefly; if it is aggressively sour, rinse it well and taste the soup before adding more salt.
- Smoked sausagesProbably a firm, already-cooked smoked link; the book does not specify a type. Fresh raw sausage would not hold up over two and a half hours in the pot.
- The flourThree tablespoons of flour cooked one minute in butter is barely a blond roux, and the hour of gentle boiling afterward is what cooks the raw taste out. Do not shorten that hour.
- SaltA level tablespoon of salt plus smoked bacon, smoked sausage and sauerkraut adds up. Start with half the salt, and correct at the end once the broth has reduced.
- Yield and the leftover meatThis makes roughly three quarts, enough for eight to ten as a first course. Only a piece each of the beef and bacon and the two sausages goes into the tureen; the recipe does not say what to do with the remainder.
- At the tableRussian practice is a spoonful of smetana or sour cream in each bowl and dark rye bread alongside. The book omits it, but the soup is built for it.
Tschi is one of many nineteenth-century transliterations of shchi, the Russian cabbage soup that stands alongside borshch as a national dish and is generally traced back through centuries of peasant cookery, when cabbage — kept in a barrel through winter — was the reliable vegetable. Sour shchi, made with sauerkraut rather than fresh cabbage, was the winter form. What is striking in this version is how thoroughly it has passed through a professional French kitchen: the pot is built like a pot-au-feu, the cabbage is sweated with onion and bound with a roux in a sautoire, and the meats are diced small and returned at the last minute as a garnish. The International Cook Book (1906) was compiled by Alexander Filippini, a Delmonico's chef, and its foreign recipes generally read this way — a foreign dish reconstructed with the vocabulary and discipline of a hotel brigade, meant for readers who had eaten it abroad rather than grown up on it.