Where is the cabbage soup, look for Russians. Cabbage soup: history of origin Invented cabbage soup

Cabbage soup
Full (rich) cabbage soup with salted saffron milk caps
Included in national cuisines
Russian kitchen
Components
Basic	Fresh or pickled cabbage
Possible	Beef, potatoes, root vegetables
Similar dishes
Borscht, Kapustnitsa, Botvinya
Cabbage soup on Wikimedia Commons

origin of name

In the original version the word "eat", dating back to Old Russian "s'to"(food) appeared in Russian at the beginning of the 16th century and meant “a nutritious drink, liquid food, stew, brew, soup seasoned with cabbage, sorrel and other herbs.” There are other versions of the ascent of the word: by the way "sorrel"(Old Russian shchaven), to Danish sky(stew, broth, borrowed from French jus - "juice") . Root of the word cabbage soup consists of one sound (and, accordingly, a letter), which is unusual for Russian nouns.

From the word cabbage soup There are a number of derivatives, the formation of which can be difficult. Such are, for example, the adjective "shana" ("A bye the spirit beckoned incredibly! And the bread lay there, cut into even thick slices. And the stove smelled of stewed porridge.” N. P. Pavlishcheva, “Ivan the Terrible”) or diminutive form of the genitive case "cheek" (“And the men serve more; the men are more soulful, they fear God: some bread, some shchetz He will give us something to eat, and whoever will offer it.” A. P. Chekhov, “On business”). Noun shchetz(along with firewood) has only the genitive case form, but does not have the nominative case.

Story

Shchi has been a staple hot dish in Russian cuisine for a long time. Apparently, the prototype of modern cabbage soup arose no earlier than the 9th century, when peasants began to grow cabbage. Since then, “the indestructible aroma of cabbage soup - the “shchi spirit” - has always lingered in the Russian hut.” The great importance of cabbage soup in the Russian diet is evidenced by the countless number of proverbs and sayings that mention the dish: “Shchi and porridge are our food”, “Where there is cabbage soup, look for us there”, “The same cabbage soup, but pour in thinner”, “This is not for you to slurp cabbage soup with bast shoes”, “Teach your wife to cook cabbage soup” etc.

Despite local differences in the preparation of the dish and its numerous variations, the principle of preparation remained unchanged: in a clay (later cast iron) pot in a Russian oven, which made it possible to maintain a mild temperature during cooking. The old pot itself was also a revered object; it was even washed very carefully, while speaking.

In general, over the long history of cabbage soup, only one amendment was made to the principle of their preparation (excluding, of course, the expansion of the bouquet of spices that became available). In the 19th century, when Russian cuisine, due to cooks invited by the nobility, was influenced by French cuisine, the flour dressing, previously traditionally added, was removed from cabbage soup.

Cabbage soup was consumed daily and universally by all segments of the population, while differing in its components: if the wealthy segments of society could afford rich cabbage soup, the poor were often limited empty. According to V.V. Pokhlebkin, cabbage soup can be eaten almost every day, since it does not become boring. Cabbage soup was also available during Christian Lent, since it could be prepared without fasting foods. We took frozen cabbage soup with us on the road in winter.

Description of the dish

Shchi is a filling multi-component soup. The complete set of cabbage soup products includes the following components:

The main vegetable and acid are mandatory for any cabbage soup. The sour taste of cabbage soup is their main feature, but it can be created not only by cabbage (although most often cabbage soup is made with cabbage and the sour taste is created by it and its brine). But a sour taste can be created, for example, by sorrel, boiled Antonov apples, and salted mushrooms. Often, cabbage soup combines various sour foods. Currently, potatoes are also added to cabbage soup, which thickens the soup, but it can be removed after cooking.

The main principle of preparing cabbage soup is to add ingredients to the soup without preliminary cooking procedures, such as frying or sautéing (excluding sauerkraut, which is stewed separately). Adding raw ingredients to soup is a characteristic technique of Russian cuisine.

Meat cabbage soup, as a rule, is cooked in beef broth, and the meat is often boiled as a whole piece. In the western regions of Russia, pork and poultry are also used, but such cabbage soup is not typical for traditional Russian cuisine. A little ham can also be added to the cabbage soup.

Lenten cabbage soup can be mushroom or completely vegetable, known as "empty". There are also fish soup, but since their preparation requires a certain combination of certain types of fish with separate heat treatment (with other combinations the dish is not so tasty), they have not become widespread.

In any version, cabbage soup is distinguished by a large selection of spices, primarily herbs and, to a lesser extent, classical spices (only black pepper and bay leaf). Spices are added to the cabbage soup at least twice. Along with spices, additional components can be added to the soup to improve the taste in the form of salted mushrooms, pickled apples, etc.

Sour cream or sour cream mixed with cream is used to whiten cabbage soup. They eat cabbage soup while snacking on rye bread

Varieties

View	Peculiarities
Overweight (rich)	The most complete version of cabbage soup using sauerkraut. Characteristic is the use of porcini mushrooms, both dry and fresh.
Prefabricated	Cabbage soup broth is prepared from various types of meat and possibly sausages. Unlike conventional cooking, the meat is not boiled in large pieces
Fish	A combination of salted sturgeon fish and various river fish is used
Lenten	Vegetable soup is possible with the addition of mushrooms. There are their varieties according to the main component (

Two sayings about one dish of Russian cuisine: “Even if you rinse the ports” and “If you lash with a whip, the bubble will not rise.” And in both there is not a word offensive, but just different taste preferences: someone likes to slurp yushka, and someone likes to have a spoon standing up. I hope you have already guessed that this is about cabbage soup. I’ve written so much about them, but I keep discovering new things.

Now the story. Nowadays it is common to admire foreign dishes such as Italian pasta or Thai coconut milk soup. In the 19th century, foreigners who visited Russia admired cabbage soup. Alexandre Dumas even included their recipe in his famous cookbook.

And Russians couldn’t imagine life without them. And when there was no cabbage, they went for a substitute, but did not refuse their favorite “bread”. Historical fact, Russian soldiers during the Patriotic War of 1812, not having the opportunity to prepare cabbage soup in France, cooked it from pickled grape leaves.

Now we mainly distinguish cabbage soup by the type of cabbage and broth: fresh or pickled, pork, beef or vegetarian (they used to be called empty). Our great-grandmothers also cooked gray cabbage soup from cabbage seedlings; lazy cabbage soup - made from very coarsely chopped vegetables; prefabricated cabbage soup: “For these, beef, fresh meat, ham and lamb are used, cut into pieces, goose and two whole chickens.”

The cabbage soup, which the Frenchman Dumas admired, contained a well-established set of vegetables: cabbage, onions, turnips and carrots. No potatoes, no tomatoes. But flour scolding was a common thing (I don’t know about other families, but my mother did it too, but I already refused). And, please, a metamorphosis: now we not only don’t put turnips in cabbage soup, we’ve forgotten the taste itself, but mashing potatoes in them is an everyday thing for me personally.

Another culinary delight, lost for centuries: in Russian homes, the French writer was probably served pies or kulebyaka with meat filling along with cabbage soup made from fresh cabbage, and crumbly buckwheat porridge was served with sauerkraut cabbage soup. Nowadays porridge is a side dish for cutlets, and pies are washed down with tea or coffee.

But the eternal rival of cabbage soup - borscht - was just entering into Great Russian usage in the century before last: “Beetroot borscht in pork lard with slices of pork and excellent millet porridge, served in small pots for each kuvert, whitened with wonderful sour cream, was the pinnacle of Ukrainian culinary art.” . Note that buckwheat goes with cabbage soup and millet goes with borscht.

I don’t know if Alexandre Dumas had a chance to taste real borscht, but I suddenly thought: Russian cuisine is like a Russian person: we readily listen to everything that comes from us, but we will never give up our main thing. Cabbage soup, although it has undergone changes, is also cabbage soup in the 21st century.

National Russian dish.

origin of name

Sour cream or sour cream mixed with cream is used to whiten cabbage soup. They eat cabbage soup while snacking on rye bread

Varieties of cabbage soup

View	Peculiarities
Overweight (rich)	The most complete version of cabbage soup using sauerkraut. Characteristic is the use of porcini mushrooms, both dry and fresh.
Prefabricated	Cabbage soup broth is prepared from various types of meat and possibly sausages. Unlike conventional cooking, the meat is not boiled in large pieces
Lenten	Vegetable soup is possible with the addition of mushrooms. There are varieties of them based on the main component (sorrel, nettle, etc.)
Gray (seedlings)	The main component of the soup is young cabbage leaves, possibly fermented in advance.
Fish	A combination of salted sturgeon fish and various river fish is used
Green cabbage soup	As a rule, sorrel, both lean and not.
Daily cabbage soup	A special type of cabbage soup, characterized not by the characteristics of the ingredients, but by its preparation, which involves wrapping the container with soup after cooking in something that allows it to retain heat for 3-4 hours, and then leaving it in the cold for a day.

Sour cabbage soup

Under a stable phrase sour cabbage soup Most often they mean not soup, but a drink, a type of kvass. The well-known phraseological unit “professor of sour cabbage soup” is associated with it, and not with the soup.

Works dedicated to cabbage soup

Vladimir Sorokin has a play “Shchi”, the group “Gas Sector” has a play.

Write a review about the article "Shchi"

Notes

Excerpt characterizing cabbage soup

At the exhibition, still as indifferent as a fly on the face of a dear dead man, an old man sat and tapped his bast shoe, and two girls with plums in their hems, which they had picked from the greenhouse trees, ran from there and stumbled upon Prince Andrei. Seeing the young master, the eldest girl, with fear expressed on her face, grabbed her smaller friend by the hand and hid with her behind a birch tree, not having time to pick up the scattered green plums.
Prince Andrei, frightened, hastily turned away from them, afraid to let them notice that he had seen them. He felt sorry for this pretty, frightened girl. He was afraid to look at her, but at the same time he had an irresistible desire to do so. A new, gratifying and calming feeling came over him when, looking at these girls, he realized the existence of other, completely alien to him and just as legitimate human interests as those that occupied him. These girls, obviously, passionately desired one thing - to carry away and finish these green plums and not be caught, and Prince Andrei wished with them the success of their enterprise. He couldn't help but look at them again. Believing themselves to be safe, they jumped out of the ambush and, squealing something in thin voices, holding their hems, ran merrily and quickly through the grass of the meadow with their tanned bare feet.
Prince Andrei refreshed himself a little by leaving the dusty area of the high road along which the troops were moving. But not far beyond the Bald Mountains he again drove onto the road and caught up with his regiment at a halt, near the dam of a small pond. It was two o'clock after noon. The sun, a red ball of dust, was unbearably hot and burned my back through my black frock coat. The dust, still the same, stood motionless above the chatter of the humming, stopped troops. There was no wind, and while driving across the dam, Prince Andrey smelled of mud and the freshness of the pond. He wanted to get into the water - no matter how dirty it was. He looked back at the pond, from which came screams and laughter. The small, muddy, green pond had apparently risen about two quarters high, flooding the dam, because it was full of human, soldier, naked white bodies floundering in it, with brick-red hands, faces and necks. All this naked, white human meat, laughing and booming, floundered in this dirty puddle, like crucian carp stuffed into a watering can. This floundering was filled with joy, and that is why it was especially sad.
One young blond soldier - Prince Andrei knew him - of the third company, with a strap under his calf, crossing himself, stepped back to take a good run and splash into the water; the other, a black, always shaggy non-commissioned officer, waist-deep in water, twitching his muscular figure, snorted joyfully, pouring water on his head with his black hands. There was the sound of slapping each other, and squealing, and hooting.
On the banks, on the dam, in the pond, there was white, healthy, muscular meat everywhere. Officer Timokhin, with a red nose, was drying himself on the dam and was ashamed when he saw the prince, but decided to address him:
- That’s good, your Excellency, if you please! - he said.
“It’s dirty,” said Prince Andrei, wincing.
- We'll clean it up for you now. - And Timokhin, not yet dressed, ran to clean it.
- The prince wants it.
- Which? Our prince? - voices spoke, and everyone hurried so much that Prince Andrey managed to calm them down. He came up with a better idea to take a shower in the barn.
“Meat, body, chair a canon [cannon fodder]! - he thought, looking at his naked body, and shuddering not so much from the cold as from an incomprehensible disgust and horror at the sight of this huge number of bodies rinsing in the dirty pond.
On August 7, Prince Bagration in his Mikhailovka camp on the Smolensk road wrote the following:
“Dear sir, Count Alexey Andreevich.
(He wrote to Arakcheev, but knew that his letter would be read by the sovereign, and therefore, as far as he was capable of this, he thought about his every word.)
I think that the minister has already reported on the abandonment of Smolensk to the enemy. It’s painful, sad, and the whole army is in despair that the most important place was abandoned in vain. I, for my part, asked him personally in the most convincing way, and finally wrote; but nothing agreed with him. I swear to you on my honor that Napoleon was in such a bag as never before, and he could have lost half the army, but not taken Smolensk. Our troops fought and are fighting like never before. I held 15 thousand for more than 35 hours and beat them; but he didn’t want to stay even 14 hours. This is shameful and a stain on our army; and it seems to me that he himself should not even live in the world. If he reports that the loss is great, it is not true; maybe about 4 thousand, no more, but not even that. Even if it’s ten, there’s war! But the enemy lost the abyss...
Why was it worth staying two more days? At least they would have left on their own; for they had no water to drink for the people and horses. He gave me his word that he would not back down, but suddenly he sent a disposition that he was leaving that night. It’s impossible to fight this way, and we can soon bring the enemy to Moscow...
The rumor is that you think about the world. To make peace, God forbid! After all the donations and after such extravagant retreats - put up with it: you will put all of Russia against you, and each of us will be forced to wear a uniform for shame. If things have already gone this way, we must fight while Russia can and while people are on their feet...
We need to command one, not two. Your minister may be a good one in his ministry; but the general is not only bad, but trashy, and the fate of our entire Fatherland was given to him... I’m really going crazy with frustration; forgive me for writing impudently. Apparently, he does not like the sovereign and wishes death for all of us, who advises us to make peace and command the army to the minister. So, I write to you the truth: prepare your militia. For the minister most masterfully leads the guest to the capital with him. Mr. Adjutant Wolzogen casts great suspicion on the entire army. He, they say, is more Napoleon than ours, and he advises everything to the minister. I am not only polite against him, but I obey like a corporal, although older than him. It hurts; but, loving my benefactor and sovereign, I obey. It’s just a pity for the sovereign that he entrusts such a glorious army to such people. Imagine that during our retreat we lost more than 15 thousand people from fatigue and in hospitals; but if they had attacked, this would not have happened. Tell me for God's sake that our Russia - our mother - will say that we are so afraid and why we are giving such a good and diligent Fatherland to the bastards and instilling hatred and shame in every subject. Why be afraid and who to be afraid of? It is not my fault that the minister is indecisive, cowardly, stupid, slow and has all bad qualities. The whole army is completely crying and cursing him to death..."

Among the countless divisions that can be made in the phenomena of life, we can subdivide them all into those in which content predominates, others in which form predominates. Among these, in contrast to village, zemstvo, provincial, and even Moscow life, one can include St. Petersburg life, especially salon life. This life is unchanged.
Since 1805, we have made peace and quarreled with Bonaparte, we have made constitutions and divided them, and Anna Pavlovna’s salon and Helen’s salon were exactly the same as they were, one seven years, the other five years ago. In the same way, Anna Pavlovna spoke with bewilderment about Bonaparte’s successes and saw, both in his successes and in the indulgence of European sovereigns, a malicious conspiracy, with the sole purpose of causing trouble and anxiety to the court circle of which Anna Pavlovna was a representative. In the same way, with Helen, whom Rumyantsev himself honored with his visit and considered a remarkably intelligent woman, in the same way, both in 1808 and in 1812, they spoke with delight about a great nation and a great man and looked with regret at the break with France, which, according to the people who gathered in Helen's salon, it should have ended peacefully.
Recently, after the arrival of the sovereign from the army, there was some unrest in these opposing circles in the salons and some demonstrations were made against each other, but the direction of the circles remained the same. Only inveterate legitimists were accepted into Anna Pavlovna’s circle from the French, and here the patriotic idea was expressed that there was no need to go to the French theater and that maintaining a troupe costs the same as maintaining an entire corps. Military events were followed greedily, and the most beneficial rumors for our army were spread. In Helen's circle, Rumyantsev's, French, rumors about the cruelty of the enemy and the war were refuted and all Napoleon's attempts at reconciliation were discussed. In this circle, they reproached those who advised too hasty orders to prepare for departure to Kazan to court and women's educational institutions under the patronage of the Empress Mother. In general, the whole matter of war was presented in Helen’s salon as empty demonstrations that would very soon end in peace, and the opinion of Bilibin, who was now in St. Petersburg and at Helen’s house (every intelligent person should have been with her), reigned that it was not gunpowder, but those who invented, they will solve the matter. In this circle, ironically and very cleverly, although very carefully, they ridiculed the Moscow delight, the news of which arrived with the sovereign in St. Petersburg.

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✪ Cabbage soup with sauerkraut video recipe

Subtitles

origin of name

The recipe for making cabbage soup reveals its deep archaism. This soup, as you know, is prepared with meat or vegetable broth, with the addition of mushrooms, and sometimes with fish. Be sure to add vegetables to the cabbage soup: cabbage, turnips, carrots, onions. Later, instead of turnips, they began to add potatoes. The historian of Russian cuisine Pokhlebkin notes a paradoxical thing: none of these ingredients are mandatory. There may or may not be meat, mushrooms may or may not be added. Even cabbage, despite the fact that it is considered the basis of cabbage soup, is not necessarily present. Everyone knows green cabbage soup cooked with sorrel, nettle and other herbs. Obviously, cabbage soup has been prepared since ancient times according to the principle: put everything that is in the house in a pot. For this reason, there are so many varieties of cabbage soup: meat, rich, combined, mushroom, lean, fish, green, etc. The housewife put everything she had in a pot, filled it with water and put it in the oven. This probably exhausted the technological subtleties of preparing cabbage soup. Don’t forget about such an archaic feature of the cabbage soup recipe as adding flour mash to the dish to make the brew more satisfying. Flour was abandoned only in the 19th century, when French cuisine came into fashion.

As for borscht, here we will not find the patriarchal simplicity of a pot of cabbage soup. Classic borscht is prepared with beet kvass, always using frying, which is typical for a kitchen that already knows what gourmet cooking is. Many borscht products require extensive pre-processing. If the housewife does without beet kvass, she must stew or bake the beets to achieve the desired red color and characteristic taste, onions and carrots are also pre-fried or stewed, tomatoes are crushed into paste. And, of course, there is no question of introducing flour mash, which will spoil the noble taste of the red soup. You can “whiten” borscht only with sour cream and nothing else.