A "Sparing" Regime, a.k.a. Striving to be Mellow

My course on cuisine is off to a good start. The students seem to be in shock from my expectations -- class in Russian, reading at home in Russian, lots of new vocabulary -- but I am encouraging them and taking my inspiration from Alexander Genis and his cabbage soup.

Cabbage soup, Shchi, was our focus last week -- we read essays about it, talked about its history, looked it up in Russian culinary dictionaries, thought about how to slowly cook it in a traditional Russian stove, and of course practiced pronouncing it. We compared recipes: soup with mushrooms and sauerkraut; cabbage soup with pearl barley; "rich" cabbage soup. Cabbage soup with chicken, cabbage soup with beef, vegetarian or "fasting" cabbage soup. We contemplated whether it's worthwhile to eat cabbage soup without smetana, or sour cream.

We also learned a proverb that will facilitate American students getting their tongues in the right position for those hushing sounds:

Shchi da kasha, pishcha nasha. 

(Cabbage soup and porridge -- that's what we eat.) 

William Pokhlebkin (whose unlikely first name, Vil'iam in Russian, stems from his father's Bolshevik roots -- he was named after VIL, Vladimir Ilych Lenin!) claims that cabbage soup has been around since the 9th century. In his culinary dictionary he confidently states that "shchi differ from all other foods in that one never gets tired of them" (in Russian, cabbage soup is plural -- one of the hallmarks, perhaps, of the respect Russians have for them, since the result is that one always addresses them with the polite, plural pronoun and verb form). The emphasis above, of course, is mine, not Pokhlebkin's, who continues: "One can eat shchi every day and never get sick of them." As he asserts, proverbially:

Rodnoi otets nadoest, a shchi -- nikogda. 

(You can get sick of your own father, but you never get sick of cabbage soup.)

Really?! It's a great claim, and one that echoes the Jewish Ukrainian grandmothers of Alexander Genis and my friend Muriel, who said something quite similar about borshcht. Some of my students seemed a bit doubtful, especially when I asserted that it is possible to eat soup -- the "first course" in any Russian dinner -- for breakfast. (I didn't mention that it's also possible to breakfast on chocolate and cheese ... everything in its time.)

But my favorite comment in this week's reading comes from Genis (a brilliant essayist, in my humble opinion -- smart, well-informed, and a rare literary stylist). In explaining how one cooks shchi, he emphasizes patience. The Russian verb is tomit'sia, which basically means "to stew," but which has other evocative meanings as well, such as "to languish." I love the idea of the plural shchi languishing in an ancient Russian stove for hours, with all the flavors gradually coming together until it (they?) is/are ready to eat.

Genis's cabbage soup, like that 19th century languishing damsel, is personified:

Скелет щей -- говяжья грудинка  

Плоть их -- капуста  

Душа -- грибы  

Улыбка -- сметана (со сливками) 

Секрет -- щадящий режим.

The skeleton of the soup is the beef brisket; the cabbage is its flesh, the mushrooms its soul, its smile is the sour cream (mixed with heavy cream).

The final ingredient in Genis's recipe -- the secret of the shchi -- is shchadiashchii rezhim (in Russian щадящий режим). 

This word, shchadiashchii, helps us again practice our hushing sounds. What in English is a horrifying S-H-C-H- (and what's more appears twice in this word!) is rendered in Russian with just one letter, щ, (and might make a high-scoring Russian scrabble word nonetheless). It seems a strange word to use in cooking.

The Russian online dictionary definitions are three:

1. не губи́ть щади́ть врага́ 

2. бере́чь щади́ть своё здоро́вье 

3. жале́ть не щади́ть де́нег

To pity one's enemy; to husband one's health; and in the negative, to be cautious with money.

The English translation is "sparing," a "sparing regime." In other words, to successfully make a good cabbage soup, one needs to take one's time. To be mellow.

I've taken this as the slogan for our course. While students are currently (perhaps) freaking out a little about trying to read the Domostroi (the 16th century Russian "Rules for Household Management) in a modern Russian translation and to master the vocabulary of food and household management, if they take a mellow attitude toward it all, everything will come out right.

Or so I've promised them.