This recipe has an outstanding story and place in my cultural heritage as both 1/16 Russian and a student. The cabbage soup has become my Western friends’ way to mock me (cultural appropriation alert). But the joke is on them for just one cabbage can feed me for three days, both lunch and dinner. And it did. For the whole of November and December in Semester 1 of Year 2, after discovering or re-discovering my great-grandmother’s roots through this earthly vegetable, I would buy a cabbage every week and eat the hell out of it in three consecutive days.
Probably this is why I won’t eat cabbage soup for at least another 2 years.
But you should definitely try it. Especially, if you are from Western Europe or the States where it is too underprivileged for your taste to eat raw cabbage – apparently, it is not something common in the UK at least. When I opened the fridge and snacked with a piece of raw cabbage, for the first time in front of my flatmates, I felt like they wanted to take a Polaroid photo of me for our Wall of Shame.
Here we go now!
It was 1927 when my great-grandmother was born in Mineralnye Vody to a Russian mother and a Bulgarian father. She was six years old when they moved to Varna – the city where I grew up. With herself she brought Russian-style blue eyes and the recipe for borsch – cabbage soup. One of these things is not true. She does have blue eyes, but they are not particularly Russian-style. They are just…blue. Let’s not make assumptions about colors’ nationality.
Oh, okay, both things are not true then, because my great-grandma didn’t bring a recipe for borsch. She was 6, for God’s sake! Also… the soup was already quite well-known in Bulgaria and it was not for its delicious presentation. Some political regimes I won’t waste time mentioning had impact on everything, including cuisine. Cabbage was cheap and easy to boil.
I won’t go deep into historical accounts but let’s call the fact that this Soviet soup found its place in our hearts. Seventy years after my great-grandmother’s birth, I came to this planet to preserve the heritage. There is one small detail of difference…
My soup is definitely not borsch.
My soup only contains cabbage as its fundamental ingredient, but I have no clue how to make borsch. Not proud of it.
Shame to my family.
The black sheep.
The 1/16 Russian disappointment experiment.
The Not-So-Great Gatsby
Mommy’s little bundle of incompetence
Anyways, as reluctant as I am, I will share my idiosyncratic self-created recipe for cabbage soup.
Don’t try this at home, kids.
Products you won’t need because you are not going to make this soup:
CABBAGE
CABBAGE
CABBAGE
Pepper 1,2,3 or as many as you want – the more the vegetables, the heartier the soup, if ya know what I mean (you can stuff yourself more and still be surprised how cheap this soup is)
Carrots – about the same quantity
Decapitated onion, the color doesn’t matter, unless you have an OCD and you want your vegetables to be similar colors. In such case, you will need to use yellow or green pepper to go with the cabbage and then have white onions.
Potato – one should be enough. If not, put more and stop complaining about the fact that I don’t give precise amounts.
Some spices… now, this is the funny part, which my pedantic with regards to cooking mom doesn’t find funny at all. I, personally, don’t know what spices are used with whatever type of food. I just open jars and if the thing inside smells like it would make the dish taste good, I pinch it and mix it with everything else. Simple as that. But, if you insist on having specific directions given to you so that there is an external source to dominate your mind, then I would say to use paprika (always and on everything), mixed pepper, oregano, savory, and salt, of course. The degree of saltiness depends on the country.
Parsley for the finishing touches. I don’t like parsley, but people say it’s good.
Did I mention CABBAGE????
The method you won’t use to make this soup:
1. Start cutting. Peel, first. Maybe I should have written the peeling part before the cutting part because there are people like me who, when they start cooking with a recipe, don’t read the whole thing. If it were me, I would see words that imply cutting and I’ll be like: “Okay. Let’s do this.” Dumb. Peel your carrots, potatoes and onions before cutting them. Then, cut them and place them in dishes or bowls because nobody has a cutting board big enough to fit that many veggies. Shapes and sizes are left for you to choose and depend on whether you would want to make some more mess after cooking by using a hand blender.
2. Forgot to say: wash your veggies. If you’ve already peeled and cut them, wash them in the bowl. Pour the water out of the bowl, but don’t forget to pick up the fallen pieces of vegetables from the sink. There will be a lot of them because I won’t have told you to use a sieve. Oh, foolish me! Eat a couple of pieces of carrots without anybody noticing. Decide that raw carrots are amazing.
3. Eat the whole portion of carrots.
4. Open the fridge to take a/new carrot/s. Realize that you are out of carrots.
5. Run to the supermarket to buy carrots.
6. When you come back, catch your breath and freak out that you have a lecture in less than an hour, which means that you need to make the soup ASAP, or even before that.
7. PEEL and cut the carrot.
8. Spend 5 minutes looking for plasters because you just cut your finger and it is bleeding like one of Sweeney Todd’s clients’ necks.
9. Once you have the situation under control, put the pot on the hob. Pour some oil and be generous – your veggies will thank you because oil helps them suffocate instead of letting them burn.
10. When the oil starts making a fizzing sound, throw your onions in and watch how the heat slowly debilitates them. Enjoy the smell of a dying vegetable. Wait until the absorption of the oil into the onion pieces is apparent, e.g. they become golden. Golden color, not the lottery gold.
11. Put in the other veggies. Usually, one should follow a strict pattern of vegetable placement: first carrots, then peppers, then potatoes, and cabbage. However, by now we have wasted so much time and we really don’t want to be late for that lecture in 40 minutes, which is why we just chuck everything in the pot with another splash of oil.
12. We don’t enjoy the smell of these veggies losing their freshness as much because we are nervous.
13. When the vegetables are weak enough, we pour water from the kettle just enough to cover them. Forgot to mention that you would need hot water in advance, but…
14. Oh, screw everything, you are late for the lecture anyways.
15. Cover the pot and wait until the gifts from nature are so soft that they might evaporate together with the water.
16. Once your soup is ready, turn off the hob.
17. With shaking hands, bring all the spice boxes and bags near the pot. Use those fingers of yours to pinch and un-pinch in the soup. Use your blouse to wipe your hands.
18. Oh, well, now you are covered in spices! Change your clothes.
19. Turn the heating in the flat off because you have lectures the whole day and the soup is still too hot to enter the fridge – you don’t need additional heating in the room to let it get rotten.
20. Run to lectures without having the time to think that your hair smells of fried onions.
P.s.: The soup in the picture is not the cabbage soup. It was just a nice, abstract composition I had made with another soup of mine.
Photo by Oziel Gòmez on https://unsplash.com/
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