Issue #86: Two Cabbage Soups

One Polish, One Jewish, Both Perfect for Cold Weather, and No, I'm Not Reviving that Diet

I’m just back from a visit with my sisters in Toronto, where we saw snow for the first time this season. The combination of family and wintery weather may be why I was craving cabbage soup. While you put up a pot yourself, why not listen to the new episode of my What’s Burning podcast, for which I interview my friend and colleague Naama Shefi, founder of two important culinary organizations that might have some relevance to a good cabbage borscht, the Jewish Food Society and Asif: Culinary Institute of Israel. Naama and I discuss the power of food and memory, the creativity and complexity of the Israeli kitchen, and so many other interesting topics. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. —Mitchell

My husband Nate doesn’t really like cabbage or soup, which makes cabbage soup a tough sell. But that doesn’t stop me from making a big pot of cabbage soup on occasion because I really love it, especially in the dead of winter, when the temperature calls for steaming bowls of hearty, warming food. Of course, because it’s just me against the soup, I have to be in the mood to eat it for a while. Yesterday, I was. And because I was home alone for dinner with everything I needed in the fridge, I made a cabbage soup. I ate four bowls.

In October, I enjoyed my Polish cabbage soup while there were still leaves on the trees up at the lakehouse.

Back in the mid 1990s, the Cabbage Soup Diet went viral. This was before the Internet, before social media, before the concept of something going viral besides viruses even existed. People had to fax each other the diet on a sheet of paper that was supposed to have been stolen from a hospital someplace that used it to treat overweight patients with heart disease. By eating the same basic cabbage soup daily, apparently, participants lost significant weight. Notes on the recipe for the magic soup were scribbled on the margins of the fax. Everyone was doing it. (See the New York Times here if you think I’m making this up.) Several of my colleagues at the James Beard Foundation organized themselves around weekly cabbage soup preparation. Although, as I’ve already said, I am a cabbage soup lover, I would have nothing to do with this diet, which was obviously a sham and proved to be totally fictitious. But the aroma of cabbage soup cooking on my stove still recalls for me that time in the office when the smell of cabbage soup reheated in the microwave hung in the air for months. My soup is better.

In fact, there are two styles of cabbage soup in my repertoire: white and red. The white one—which admittedly may actually be green from the cabbage or reddish from the paprika, I dunno, I’m colorblind—is a typical Polish soup. It has a smokey flavor from bacon and kielbasa and a slight tang from sauerkraut. I like to enhance its flavor with additional brine from the kraut, from kosher dills, or from any other lacto-fermented pickle.

For the Polish soup I use my own homemade sauerkraut, which is flavored with garlic and caraway.

The red one I think of as a Jewish soup, probably of Polish origin, too. This is my mother’s cabbage borscht, colored bright red from tomato paste and made sweet and sour from sugar and lemon juice. Don’t let the name mislead you; there are no beets in this soup. But there is flanken, a flavorful, kosher cut of beef short rib that used to be very inexpensive until short ribs became the it beef among chefs. Use any beef short rib. Like most simple, peasant soups, this one benefits from a synergy of flavors that results from only a few humble ingredients. Also, it is better the next day.

I really love them both.

But I can’t always eat a whole pot myself. If you plan to freeze leftovers of either soup—my mother always had some of her cabbage borscht in her freezer—it’s best to remove the potatoes, which don’t reconstitute well after freezing, turning mealy. If you plan to keep either soup in the fridge, it will last for two to three weeks. Hopefully you will not have to eat yours alone.  

A few notes on ingredients. You are making soup, so you should use up what you’ve got in your fridge. Some fennel, a leek, a parsnip, some celery root, two carrots (instead of one), you get the picture. These recipes are just guidelines. A crisp white or green cabbage is best. Save the Savoy and red cabbage for something else. Although the Polish soup would traditionally be thickened with a flour roux, I use white miso instead to add umami and a little density. It certainly isn’t traditional, but it’s delicious.

Yesterday’s Polish cabbage soup for dinner.

RECIPE: Polish Cabbage Soup

• 2 or 3 slices bacon, cut crosswise into strips or lardons

• One 4- to 6-ounce piece kielbasa, split in half lengthwise and sliced about ¼-inch thick

• 1 large onion, thinly sliced

• 1 stalk celery, thinly sliced, leaves and all

• 1 medium carrot, peeled and thinly sliced

• 1/2 small green cabbage (about ¾ pound), cored and thinly sliced into shreds

• 1 cup sauerkraut, with liquid (you can use kimchi for a different effect)

• ½ cup additional sauerkraut juice or kosher dill pickle brine, optional

• 2 medium Yukon Gold potatoes (about 12 ounces), peeled and cut into chunks

• 1 quart chicken stock

• 1 quart water

• 1 large bay leaf

• ½ teaspoon caraway seed (optional)

• 1 tablespoon white miso, preferably saikyo miso

• 2 teaspoons sweet paprika

• Handful chopped fresh dill

• Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Place the bacon in the bottom of a large saucepan or Dutch oven and cook over medium-high heat for 3 or 4 minutes to render some of the fat. Add the kielbasa and cook another few minutes until it begins to brown. Add the onion and cook about 5 minutes to wilt. Add the carrot, green cabbage, sauerkraut with liquid, kosher dill pickle brine, if using, potatoes, chicken stock, water, bay leaf, and caraway, if using. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to a simmer, cover, and let cook for 30 minutes until the potato and carrot are tender. In a small bowl, combine the miso and paprika. Ladle some of the hot liquid from the soup into the bowl and stir to dissolve the miso. Pour this mixture back into the soup and stir, scraping out everything from the bowl. Stir the soup, add the dill, bring back to a boil, and turn off the heat. Adjust the seasoning with freshly ground black pepper and salt. The soup is good eaten right away, but better the next day. Remove any potato before freezing.

A bowl of sweet-and-sour cabbage borscht.

RECIPE: My Mother’s Cabbage Borscht

• 1 pound flanken (aka strips of beef short ribs on the bone)

• 1 large onion, thinly sliced

• 1 small green cabbage (about 1 pound), cored and thinly sliced into shreds

• 1 small can (6 ounces) tomato paste

• Juice of 2 or 3 lemons

• 2 or 3 tablespoons sugar

• 1 tablespoon kosher salt

• 1 teaspoon sweet paprika

• Freshly ground black pepper

• 2 quarts water

• 2 medium Yukon gold potatoes (about 12 ounces), peeled and cut into chunks

In a large saucepan or Dutch oven, combine the flanken or short ribs, onion, cabbage, tomato paste along with one canful of water to rinse it out, juice of 2 lemons, 2 tablespoons of sugar, salt, paprika, a generous amount of black pepper, and 2 quarts of water. Bring to a boil, skim off any scum that rises to the surface, set the cover ajar, reduce the heat to simmer, and let cook for about an hour. Add the potatoes and continue cooking another hour or so until soft and the meat is tender enough to fall off the bone. Cool. Fish out the flanken, remove any bones or gristle, and return chunks of cooked meat to the pot. Taste and adjust the seasoning with additional salt, pepper, lemon juice and/or sugar. You want the soup to be distinctively sweet and sour. The soup is best cooled, chilled, and reheated the next day. Adjust the seasoning again before serving. Remove any potatoes before freezing.