The most archaic dish of Russian cuisine for the second millennium continues to maintain its advanced position. Cabbage soup is the first dish in every sense.
Unfortunately, many soup recipes have disappeared from Russian cuisine forever, because they began to be recorded too late in the seventeenth century, when French culinary technologies were already widely used in Russia. But even those few preserved recipes of cabbage soup amaze with their variety, originality and sometimes even sophistication.
We’ll try to cook cabbage soup based on old recipes using modern technology, but first we’ll figure out how cabbage soup became famous and how they differ from other first courses in world culinary.
Fresh cabbage soup with beef - the main technological highlights
Now it’s somehow not customary to decorate the festive table with first courses. Contemporaries are more concerned with the search for unusual recipes for salads, baked meat, original snacks.
Cabbage soup was served on our ancestors for any reason, and therefore there were hundreds of recipes: with sour or fresh cabbage, with sorrel, nettle, spinach, quinoa, with turnip or rutabaga, with potatoes, beans and cereals, with brine dressing, sour apples, cherries, gooseberries, lemons. Cabbage soup could be lean, on vegetable, mushroom or fish broth. On holidays, tables were decorated with fast-food cabbage soup: on meat broth from poultry (chickens, quail, pigeons, black grouse), beef, pork or wild boar, hare. Often, broth was used for meat and fish, and mushrooms at the same time. Moreover, several types of meat and fish were consumed simultaneously. Such cabbage soup was a status dish that only rich people could afford.
Any soup soup was prepared carefully. These days, the requirements for the broth have not changed:
• Transparency was appreciated, especially since the time of Peter the Great; and this, despite the fact that soup was and remains an obligatory part of the whitewash - the addition of sour cream, cream, flour mixture.
• The broth must be saturated, no matter what products it is prepared.
• The aroma, which was formed by adding spicy roots. Spicy components were necessarily added to cabbage soup twice: at the beginning and at the end of cooking. Spices, usual for modern housewives, - pepper and salt - were served more often on the table, since they were considered unthinkable luxury. One could add to the broth if, again, social status and bay leaves allowed.
In modern conditions, when cabbage soup is more often boiled on the stove than in the oven that replaced the Russian oven, the broth can be cooked immediately before cooking cabbage, then filtered, removing sediment, peppercorns, boiled bay leaf. It is also convenient to prepare the broth in advance and freeze it in sealed packaging.
In Russia, often used for cabbage soup, baked in the oven the day before. Most likely, this is how the red broth appeared: a brown crust and oven-baked roots, berry or honey sauce gave the broth a beautiful color, and cabbage soup was complemented by a new shade of taste.
Having analyzed the recipes for cabbage soup, we can draw the following conclusion: the most common in the middle-income class, starting from the second half of the eighteenth century, was broth for beef soup.
An essential ingredient of cabbage soup is cabbage. Of course, cabbage soup classic, made from sour cabbage is a special and unique recipe anywhere in the world, but sauerkraut is not always at hand, and in our ancestors it was generally a seasonal product. By spring, oak tubs were empty in the cellars, and before the new harvest, cabbage soup was made from fresh herbs, and even from cabbage seedlings. At the same time, the role of cabbage brine - a must for acidic dressing - was played by other products with a high content of vitamin C. Fresh cabbage was supplemented with sorrel, mashed gooseberries or cherries, sour apples, and later with tomatoes that appeared on the farm in the southern regions of Russia, thanks to the discovery of America and the efforts of progressive Russian emperors.
Everyone is familiar with the general rules of the cabbage soup: broth, cabbage, spicy and sour dressing, whitewash. Over the past millennium, this rule has remained unchanged. We summarize what has been said above with a rhetorical question: how many recipes for cabbage soup have received the greatest popularity to date, and how many of them have remained untested? Let's not let cabbage soup into oblivion: from fresh cabbage with beef and cherries, gooseberries and all sorts of interesting, unusual, from our time, original ingredients.
Try it, it's delicious!
1. White cabbage with fresh beef and lemon dressing
Products:
Beef broth 2.4 l
Boiled beef (pulp) 1.2 kg
Cabbage, young 1 kg
Sour cream 250 g
Boiled rice 300 g
Greenery
Spice
Oil 120 g
Lemons 2 pcs.
Onion 120 g
Flour 70 g
Order of preparation:
Peeled and chopped onions, passer with flour in butter (ghee). Boil round rice in a large amount of water, fold through a sieve. Chop the cabbage. Remove the zest from the lemons and squeeze the juice. Put all prepared cabbage ingredients in a saucepan, including beef pulp cut in portions. Add spices to taste, zest and pour the broth. Put the cabbage soup in the oven for 40 minutes. Season with sour cream, and when serving, garnish with chopped herbs.
2. Prefabricated cabbage soup with beef, white beans and mushrooms
Product Composition:
Ceps, fresh (net) 240 g
Mushroom seasoning 5 g
Cabbage 800 g
Carrot, red 150 g
Puree, tomato 200 g
Beans, natural, canned 350 g
Onion 180 g
Flour 100 g
Potato 360 g
Vegetable oil or margarine 120 g
Chopped greens
Spice
Sour cream
For meat broth:
Roots, bay leaf, onions
Beef with bone 1.8 kg
Operating procedure:
Wash and soak the meat, cut the film. Put in a saucepan and cook slowly until boiling. Remove the foam. Forty minutes later, after the boil begins, put the roots, and after another fifteen minutes - bay leaf, pepper.
In a deep saucepan, fry the grated carrots, onions, add flour, tomato and a little broth. Transfer the meat temporarily to a dish, strain the broth, and transfer to a saucepan. Put chopped mushrooms, potatoes. Cook another ten minutes. Add chopped cabbage, washed canned beans. Try cabbage soup taste, let it boil and remove from heat.
Serve with fresh chopped herbs and sour cream.
3. Fresh cabbage soup with beef and cherry
List of ingredients:
Fresh seedless cherry 400 g
Breast 1.8 kg
Roots, different 250 g
Pork fat 150 g
Pepper
Onion 270 g
Parsley, green
Cardamom
Cauliflower 800 g
Flour (for whitening) 120 g
Oil 150 g
Homemade sour cream 350 g
Water 3.0 L
Ground cloves
Bay leaf
Working process:
Grind cherries with a blender and wipe through a sieve. Put meat, pork fat, onion and roots on a baking sheet, sprinkle with pepper and cardamom, without salt. Pour with mashed cherry puree, cover with foil and simmer in the oven for about an hour. Remove the foil and let the meat brown well. Then transfer the beef, baked with cherry sauce in a saucepan, along with the baked roots and juice. Pour in water and simmer over a quiet fire for about twenty minutes. Remove the roots from the broth with a slotted spoon. Try it, and bring to the desired taste with spices, adding bay leaf and a couple of buds of chopped cloves.
Melt the butter in a saucepan, fry the flour. Put the cabbage inflorescences and chopped onions. Large inflorescences cut in half. Season with pepper, fry, add sour cream, diluted with part of the broth. Stew for five minutes. Transfer the cabbage into a pot with broth, let it boil, add chopped greens and cover. Wrap or place the pan in a warm place so that cabbage soup does not cool quickly.
Half an hour after insisting of cabbage, serve them with white croutons.
4. Prefabricated cabbage soup with beef and mushrooms
Product Composition:
Beef broth (according to the recipe No. 2) 2,4 l
Turkey breast 900 g
Butter 160 g
Royal champignons, fresh 400 g
Brussels sprouts 600 g
5 eggs
Leek 250 g and onions 150 g
Spicy spices
Parsley and dill (leaves)
Cream (15%) 500 ml
Fresh sorrel 800 g
Order of preparation:
In a beef broth, cook the turkey fillet, adding spices. Put the meat on a plate. When it cools down, cut across the fibers in portions. Fry the sliced mushrooms with onions and transfer to the broth. In the same oil, passer leek and brussels sprouts heads, cut them in half. Add cabbage to the pan. Pour the cream there. Darken cabbage soup for 7-10 minutes, add chopped sorrel, herbs, adjust the taste with spices. Insist a quarter of an hour, serve with boiled eggs, putting meat in each serving.
5. Fresh cabbage soup with beef and sour apples
Composition:
Breast 900 g
Young cabbage 700 g
Green apples 8 pcs.
Onion 350 g
Black pepper
Turnip 0.5 kg
Dill 120 g
Bay leaf
Sour cream (21%) 150 g
Working process:
Cook the usual meat broth (see recipes above). Strain, put chopped cabbage, onions, roots in it. After fifteen minutes, add the straws, sliced in strips, and after five minutes - spiced greens.
6. Rich cabbage soup with beef
Products:
Chicken Breast 0.6 kg
Beef (shoulder) 2.0 kg
Cooked smoked ham 400 g
Smoked bacon 100 g
Cabbage 0.8 kg
Onion 200 g
Bay leaf
Wheat flour 80 g
Red carrots 180 g
Black pepper (grains)
Celery (stalks) 100 g
Homemade sour cream 200 g
Chopped greens and parsley root
Butter or margarine
Salt
Salty or pickled mushrooms 300 g
Cooking:
Season the beef with chopped roots and pieces of smoked bacon with spices and bake in the oven, laying in a deep cast-iron dish. Stew the meat in its own juice with the lid open so that it is slightly browned. Add the chopped breast and ham, fill the meat portion with cabbage with water and keep in the oven at 120 ° C for another half hour.
In a saucepan, sauté until softly diced cabbage and celery stalks, after dissolving the butter. Transfer vegetables to a cast-iron pan while adding sour cream, chopped herbs and chopped mushrooms. Adjust the taste, cover the cabbage soup and turn off the oven. Let stand a little and serve.
These cabbage soup can also be supplemented with potatoes, boiled eggs.
Fresh cabbage soup with beef - tips
- Stew vegetables in a sealed container to better preserve vitamins. When boiling cabbage and other vegetables should be completely covered with water.
- You can refresh withered leafy greens by holding it in a vinegar solution (10%).
- Before cleaning, peeled mushrooms should be stored in acidified water so that they do not darken.
- In order for dried mushrooms to acquire their original freshness, put them overnight in salted cold milk.
- To cook vegetables in cabbage soup at the same time, cut them the same size.
- Salt the potatoes at the end of cooking.
- To improve the taste, add a little sugar when stirring or boiling vegetables.
- Milk, sour cream, cream improve the taste of fresh cabbage, especially cauliflower.
- If fresh cabbage is accidentally digested, hold it slightly in an acidic solution of vinegar, lemon or apple juice.
