Bess Feigenbaum’s Cabbage Soup.

Nov 25, 2015 Posted in Ketolishus 0 Comments

Bess Feigenbaum’s Cabbage Soup. If you had a Russian grandma, she’d make you this, and you’d eat the fuck out of it. But if you don’t, use the recipe below and brace yourself for a bright, warming experience. Love brisk eastern European flavors? This has your name written all over it!

This is very cheap and easy (chop, dump, and simmer), but very luscious soup. It’s also completely meat and dairy-free, unless you garnish with sour cream. And yeah…there’s a teeny bit of ketchup in it (shaddup, Samuel Peart!), and by teeny, I mean (in the grand scheme of everything else in it) by comparison, 1/2 cup is kinda teeny. Anyway, the ketchup, tomatoes, carrots, and onions cook down into a lovely, sweet and earthy and bright base that practically braises the cabbage til it’s almost as soft as butter and absolutely beautiful. You MUST have a blob of sour cream on top, because it just needs that cool hit of dairy to temper off the mega-brightness of the rest of it.

Here we go…you’re gonna need:

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons garlic, chopped

1 onion, chopped

3 cups water

1 28-oz. can plum tomatoes, undrained (San Marzano are my fave)

1 cup carrots, sliced

1 cup tomato paste

1/4 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup ketchup

1 bay leaf

1/2 cup lemon juice

1/2 cup golden raisins (optional–I did NOT add raisins!)

3 lbs cabbage, I’ve done it with green and Savoy cabbage

Salt and fresh cracked black pepper to taste

Sour cream

A stick blender would come in really handy, too

It’s not even full-blown winter in St. Paul*, and I’m about to make my second huge pot of this!

Directions:

Set a large pot on the stove to medium-low and heat olive oil. Add your garlic and cook for around two minutes until tender but not browned. Then add onions and sauté til translucent. Add 3 cups water, then dump in your carrots, tomatoes (with their juice/puree), tomato paste, brown sugar, and ketchup, and stir to combine.

Add the bay leaf and simmer about 10-15 minutes, then smash up the tomatoes (I used a potato masher). Keep on simmering about 10 more minutes or until the carrots are fork-tender. Discard the bay leaf.

Get out your stick blender and whir up the mixture til it is still lumpy, but mostly puréed (a little coarse). Next, add the lemon juice, cabbage, and 3 more cups of water. Yes, you NEED the lemon juice, it sounds like a crazy amount–trust me on this.

Change heat to medium-high and bring the pot to an active simmer until cabbage is soft, about 2 hours. This seems like an eternity, but trust me, it’s worth it! If in doubt on the texture of the cabbage after 2 hours, give it 3–I found this to be the case with using green cabbage. You want to wait til the cabbage has literally almost melted and has turned to silky strands. So if the slices are still sticking up every which-way, do not be afraid to let it cook another hour or so, because it’s not going to reduce all to heck, if the cabbage is not completely soft, as it’s still retaining more of it’s liquid, PLUS, you can add even a bit more water to thin it to desired consistency (and since the flavors are so strong, it’s encouraged that you do).

About 10 minutes before serving, add the raisins (optional). Give the soup a few hearty twists of black pepper, and serve with a dollop of sour cream (or yogurt is OK, too).

Notes:

I left out the raisins, halved the brown sugar (the tomatoes I used had a bit of sugar in them already), and used a full 12 oz can of tomato paste, and I think that evened things out. I used just short of 1/2 cup of Heinz Simply Ketchup, which uses sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup.

It’s one of those soups that will warm up your whole place and make your mouth water while it’s cooking into something really a LOT less weird and wacky as it sounds.

* seriously, tough winter here’s not til February, and I’ll have made probably even more by then.