The most archaic dish of Russian cuisine is already the second millennium continues to retain its leading positions. Soup - the first dish in every sense.
Unfortunately, many recipes of cabbage soup disappeared from Russian cuisine forever, because they began to be recorded too late, in the seventeenth century, when French culinary technologies were already widespread in Russia. But even those few surviving recipes of cabbage soup amaze with their diversity, originality and sometimes even refinement.
Let's try to cook soup on the basis of old recipes, applying modern technologies, but first we will understand what soup became famous, and how they differ from other first courses in world cuisine.
Fresh cabbage soup with beef - the main technological moments
Now somehow it is not customary to decorate the festive table with first courses. Contemporaries are more concerned about finding unusual recipes for salads, baked meat, original appetizers.
Our ancestors soup served on the table for any reason, and therefore they existed hundreds of recipes: with sour or fresh cabbage, with sorrel, nettle, spinach, quinoa, turnip or turnip, with potatoes, beans and cereals, with brine dressing, sour apples, cherries, gooseberries, lemons. Soup could be lean, in vegetable, mushroom or fish broth. On holidays, the tables were decorated with skomiks: on meat broth from poultry (chickens, quails, pigeons, black grouses), beef, pork or wild boar, hare. Often, for broths, meat, fish, and mushrooms were used at the same time. What is more, meat and fish were consumed simultaneously by several types. Such soup was a status dish that only rich people could afford.
Any broth for cabbage prepared especially carefully. Today, the requirements for broth have not changed:
• Transparency was appreciated, especially since the time of Peter the Great; and this, in spite of the fact that for the soup there was and remains an indispensable part of the hook - adding sour cream, cream, and flour mixture. • Broth must be saturated, of whatever products it is not prepared.
• Flavor, which is formed by the addition of spicy roots. Spicy ingredients must be added to the soup twice: at the beginning and at the end of cooking. Habitual for modern housewives spices - pepper and salt - were served more often on the table, because they were considered inconceivable luxury. One could add to the broth, if, again, allowed the social status, a bay leaf.
As applied to modern conditions, when the soup is more often cooked on the stove than in the oven that replaced the Russian oven, the broth can be cooked just before cooking the soup, and then filtered, removing the sediment, pea peas, and boiled bay leaves. The broth is also convenient to prepare in advance and freeze it in a sealed package.
In Russia, meat was often used for cabbage, baked in the oven the day before. Most likely, this is how the red broth appeared: a ruddy crust and roasted in the oven, berry or honey sauce gave the broth a beautiful color, and the soup was complemented by a new shade of taste.
After analyzing recipes for cabbage soup, we can draw the following conclusion: the most common among the middle-income class, beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century, was broth for cabbage soup made from beef.
Mandatory ingredient cabbage - cabbage. Of course, classic cabbage soup, sauerkraut is a special and unique recipe anywhere in the world, but sauerkraut is not always on hand, and our ancestors had a seasonal product. By the spring, oak tubs were emptied in the cellars, and until the new harvest they cooked cabbage soup from fresh greens, and even from cabbage seedlings. At the same time, the role of cabbage pickle — obligatory for the soup sour dressing — was played by other products with a high content of vitamin C. Fresh cabbage was supplemented with sorrel, grated berries of the gooseberry or cherry, sour apples, and later - tomatoes, which appeared in 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 cabbage soup: broth, cabbage, spicy and sour dressing, jam. Over the last millennium, this rule has remained unchanged. We summarize, above, a rhetorical question: how many recipes of cabbage soup today have received the greatest popularity, and how many of them are left untested? We will not allow shchi to bring to oblivion: from fresh cabbage with beef and cherry, gooseberry and all sorts of interesting, unusual, in our times, original components.
Try it, it's delicious!
1. White cabbage soup made from fresh cabbage with beef and lemon dressing
Products:
Broth, beef 2,4 l
Boiled beef (pulp) 1.2 kg
Cabbage, young 1 kg
Sour cream 250 g
Cooked rice 300 g
Greenery
Spice
Oil 120 g
Lemons 2 pcs.
Onion 120g
Flour 70 g
Preparation:
Pass the peeled and chopped onion with flour on butter. Boil round rice in plenty of water, fold it through a sieve. Chop the cabbage. Remove the zest from the lemons and squeeze out the juice. Put all prepared ingredients of the soup into the pan, including the beef cut into portions. Add spices to taste, zest and pour broth. Put the soup in the oven for 40 minutes. Fill with sour cream, and when serving, decorate with chopped greens.
2. Combined cabbage soup from fresh cabbage with beef, white beans and mushrooms
Composition of products:
White mushrooms, fresh (net) 240 g
Mushroom seasoning 5g
Cabbage 800 g
Carrots, red 150 g
Puree, tomato 200 g
Natural canned beans 350 g
Onion 180g
Flour 100 g
Potatoes 360 g
Vegetable oil or margarine 120 g
Chopped greens
Spice
Sour cream
For meat broth:
Roots, bay leaves, onions
Beef with bone 1.8 kg
Working order:
Wash and soak the meat, cut off the film. Put in a saucepan and cook slowly, until boiling. Remove foam. Forty minutes later, after the start of boiling, put the roots, and after another fifteen minutes - bay leaf, pepper. In a deep sauté pan, saute carrots, onions, add flour, tomato and some broth. Put the meat temporarily on a dish, strain the broth, and pour it into a saucepan. Put the sliced mushrooms, potatoes. Cook for another ten minutes. Add shredded cabbage, washed canned beans. Try to taste the soup, let it boil and remove from heat.
Serve with fresh chopped greens and sour cream.
3. Fresh cabbage soup with beef and cherry
Ingredient list:
Fresh pitted cherries 400 g
Breast 1.8 kg
Roots, different 250 g
Pork fat 150 g
Pepper
Onion 270g
Parsley, green
Cardamom
Cauliflower, 800 g
Flour (for jamming) 120 g
Oil 150 g
Sour cream 350 g
Water 3.0 l
Ground cloves
Bay leaf
Progress:
Chop the cherry with a blender and rub through a sieve. Put meat, pork fat, onions and roots on a baking sheet, sprinkle with pepper and cardamom, without salt. Pour over the grated cherry puree, cover with foil and simmer in the oven for about an hour. Remove the foil and allow the meat to brown well. Then transfer the beef, baked under a cherry sauce, to the pan, along with the baked roots and juice. Fill with water and boil on a quiet fire for about twenty minutes. Remove skimmer roots from the broth. Try it, and bring to the desired taste with spices, adding bay leaf and a couple of buds of crushed cloves.
Melt the butter in a saucepan, fry the flour. Put cabbage blossoms and chopped onions. Cut into large florets in half. Season with pepper, fry, add sour cream, diluted part of the broth. Stew for five minutes. Transfer the cabbage to the pan with the broth, let it boil, add the chopped greens and cover with the lid. Wrap or put the pan in a warm place so that the soup does not cool quickly.
Half an hour after the infusion of soup, serve them with white croutons.
4. Combined cabbage soup made from fresh cabbage with beef and champignons
Composition of products:
Beef broth (prescription number 2) 2.4 l Turkey Breast 900 g
Butter 160 g
Royal champignons, fresh 400 g
Brussels sprouts 600 g
Eggs 5 pcs.
Leek 250 g and onions 150 g
Spicy Spices
Parsley and dill (leaves)
Cream (15%) 500 ml
Fresh sorrel 800 g
Preparation:
In beef broth, cook turkey fillet, adding spices. Put the meat on a plate. When cool, cut across the fibers in portions. Sliced champignons fry with onions and shift into broth. In the same oil, passive the leeks and heads of Brussels sprouts, cut them in half. Add the cabbage to the pan. Pour the cream there. Then cabbage minutes 7-10, add chopped sorrel, herbs, adjust the taste with spices. Insist a quarter of an hour, serve with boiled eggs, putting meat in each portion.
5. Fresh cabbage soup with beef and sour apples
Composition:
Breast 900 g
Baby cabbage 700 g
8 green apples
Onion 350g
Black pepper
Turnip 0.5 kg
Dill 120g
Bay leaf
Sour cream (21%) 150 g
Progress:
Prepare the usual meat broth (see recipes above). Strain, put in his shredded cabbage, onions, roots. Fifteen minutes later, add the apples, cut into strips, and after five minutes - spicy greens.
6. Rich cabbage soup with beef
Products:
Chicken Breast 0.6 kg
Beef (spatula) 2.0 kg
Cooked smoked ham 400 g
Smoked Fat 100 g
Cabbage 0.8 kg
Onions 200g
Bay leaf
Flour, wheat 80 g
Red carrot 180 g
Black pepper (grain)
Celery (stalks) 100 g
Sour cream 200 g
Chopped greens and parsley root
Butter or margarine
Salt
Salted or pickled mushrooms 300 g
Cooking:
Season the beef with chopped roots and pieces of smoked bacon with spices and bake in the oven, put in a deep iron dishes. Simmer the meat in its own juice with the lid open so that it slightly browned. Add the chopped breast and ham, cover the meat with taut water and keep in the oven at 120 ° C for another half hour. In a skillet, gently dice the cabbage and celery stalks until soft, after having dissolved the butter. Put the vegetables in a cast-iron pan, at the same time adding sour cream, chopped greens and chopped ryzhiki. Adjust the taste, cover your soup with a lid and turn off the oven. Let stand for a while and serve.
These soup can also be supplemented with potatoes, boiled eggs.
Fresh cabbage and beef cabbage soup - useful tips
- Stew vegetables in a sealed container to better preserve the vitamins. When cooking, cabbage and other vegetables should be covered with water completely.
- Refresh faded leafy greens by holding it in vinegar (10%).
- Peeled mushrooms should be stored in acidic water before they are heat treated so that they do not darken.
- In order for the dried mushrooms to acquire the original freshness, put them at night in salted cold milk.
- To cook vegetables in shchi simultaneously, cut them equally in size.
- Salting potatoes is necessary at the end of cooking.
- To improve the taste, add a little sugar when sauteing 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.
