My grandfather’s cabbage soup was just sliced onion and big chunks of potato and cabbage. You had to cut the potatoes with the edge of the spoon. Lots of dill and thickened with sour cream. Sometimes he would poach a few eggs in the pot before serving (one to a customer).
My older sister’s (born in ‘48) cabbage soup replaced the sour cream with a can of condensed cream of mushroom soup. The mushrooms were a plus. The funky Campbell’s thickeners weren’t.
The best cabbage soup I’ve ever tasted was in a cafe in Bratislava. The vegetables were cut much smaller, celery and carrot were in there too, probably flavored with marjoram instead of dill, could have been based on meat broth instead of water, but the big difference was…tomato. I had never had tomatoes in cabbage soup. Like Manhattan vs. New England clam chowder, the tomato replaced dairy completely.
Nearly all the recipes I find in books or online call for tomato. My family might be a weird anomaly. What do YOU put in your cabbage soup?
Cabbage, onions, potato, maybe parsips or rutabaga. Chicken broth. Rosemary, basil, parsley, thyme. Salt and pepper. No tomatoes.
I dunno. Maybe it’s a northern European thing to eschew tomatoes? I don’t dislike tomatoes. I like tomato soup. I’ve even liked cabbage soup with tomatoes. But it’s not MY cabbage soup.
No tomatoes here. Cabbage or a mix of cabbage and saeurkraut, potatoes, smoked sausage, carrot, parsnip, onion, broth of whatever type you feel, or make a smoked meat stock by throwing in a big ol’ ham hock or similar (which is what I typically do.) You can also add a bit of horseradish for some zing.
Puly always beats me to these threads but I recently made kapusniak for the first time. It’s something I’ve purchased already prepared before at the Polish grocery where it’s called sauerkraut soup. It was perhaps my most successful new recipe attempt in the last year. A solid base of onion, celery & carrot with diced smoked pork belly (aka bacon) & smoked sausage, a bag of kraut, some potato chunks and chicken stock. Some marjoram and, critically, toasted caraway seeds made it perfect.
A little paprika and maybe the carrot made it look reddish but no tomato, though. It’s not ‘my recipe’ yet but on the fast track.
Yeah, with the cabbage/cabbage-sauerkraut soup, it’s not something I usually add, but it’s an option. Horseradish I more commonly add to Polish Easter Soup/żurek/biały barszcz/white borscht. I’m looking through my Polish recipes, and the horseradish-spiked version of sauerkraut soup actually uses the horseradish root as one of the soup vegetables for making the stock. I myself have only used prepared horseradish to spike it a bit at the table.
I mean of just plain fresh cabbage soup, not sauerkraut soup, but I add it to either (though I rarely make it with just fresh cabbage. I usually at least use a mix of cabbage and sauerkraut.)
Well, I don’t want to get into who owns a particular dish, but I know it as kapuśniak, and Polish. There is also kwaśnica, which is a similar soup from the Polish Highlander region in the south, bordering Slovakia, but is always made from sauerkraut and not fresh cabbage, as far as I know (especially since the root of the dish comes from a word meaning “sour.”) I don’t know what the names of the Slovak analogues would be, but I’m sure they must exist.
ETA: OK, I see kapustnica, which, like kapuśniak, has the root word of “cabbage” (kapusta in both languages) in there.
Well, all Central European cuisines steal shamelessly from each other.
One of my favorite “concept” cookbooks is called All Along the Danube, and it follows the river from Germany through Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, all the way through to Bulgaria and the Black Sea. Lotsa crossovers!
I thought it might be a Slovakian specialty because when I googled “Slovakian cabbage soup” nearly every hit I got included sauerkraut. I assume they copped the recipe from a dear old auntie in Krakow.
The first thing they taught us how to make in my high school home ec class was vegetable soup, but I would call it cabbage soup, myself.
It had cabbage, tomatoes, carrots, string beans, and potatoes, and it was damned good. I’ve always made my mixed vegie soups heavy on the cabbage, so they might as well be called cabbage soup. And they always have tomatoes in them.
And stuffed cabbage always has a tomatoey sauce on it, or at least it does in all the recipes I read.
I’ve never tried any of these Central Eastern European soups you’re talking about. I guess they’re easier to find on the east coast.
Family recipe of Mom’s. More or less ricet/rischert as tracked through food migration over the past fewthousand years. The second link is in German, page 10 of the PDF. Roughly speaking some poor miner forgot his lunch dishes and we dug them up and anylized the leftoves. Beans, barley, onions, cabbage, herbs … My mom’s came over from Altekirchen Germany in roughly 1630 something, and developed in the US with the newer available ‘food fads’
I started tweaking it to be a food pyramid soup. 1 exchange of meat [I prefer medium italian sausage or chunks of pork butt, but have used chunks of ham, and had it made with pretty much everything from squirrel, rabbit, venison, beef, pork, lamb, chicken and regretfully with fresh salmon.] Fat is whatever s in the meat, I don’t worry overmuch. 4 cups shredded cabbage, 1 cup each chopped onion, celery, carrot, a couple bags of baby spinach [my mom favored mustard greens, but if she had beets and beet greens, they went in] a cup of dried white beans, a cup of barley, a cup of turnip or rutabaga, or potato and as much garlic as I feel like. Seasoned with summer savory and thyme, ground pepper and I use homemade defatted chicken broth, but it is just as good with plain water. Good comfort food for cold yucky winters, fantastic to come into the house and smell it mumbling away on a wood stove.
My mother was first generation Slovak–both parents came over in 1921, but she was born in the USA. She made a stuffed cabbage recipe called (phonetically) holupki. Cabbage rolls stuffed with rice and meat, steamed in a pot with sauerkraut. No tomatoes. Sounds like some of the recipes mentioned here.
My first husband’s mother was Polish and made a sweet-sour stuffed cabbage recipe without the sauerkraut and with tomatoes/tomato sauce, a smidge of brown sugar and a dash of vinegar. BTW, Costco has a great version of this in their packaged (not frozen) foods section.
I make a cabbage soup in my Instant Pot with the flavors of the tomato version, as stuffing cabbage leaves is waaaay too much work for me. It is heavenly and I can consume an entire pot of it by myself over the course of a week. Deeee-vine!
How many off those things you people are pronounced like ka-poosh-ka? Cause ka-poosh-ka is what my polish friends in Hamtramck make for parties, but it isn’t nasty ass boiled cabbage soup, it’s a thick hearty hot cabbage salad.
Ka-poo-stah is the Polish word for “cabbage” or “sauerkraut.” I’m not familiar with “ka-poosh-ka”, but it sounds like it could be a cutesy diminutive of this word.
