Rassolnik with Kidney

History

Rassolnik takes its name from rassol, the salty-sour brine left from pickling cucumbers, plus the suffix -nik. The distinctively Russian trick of building a soup on pickle brine is old: rassolnik's medieval ancestor was kalya, a brine soup already listed in the 1550s household manual Domostroi in versions such as sterlet with cucumbers and salmon with lemons. Kalya originally combined pickle brine, meat or fish, roe and pickled cucumbers. The word rassolnik itself is documented in Russian cookery books from the 18th century, and as late as the 1840s Gogol's Notebook still recorded it as a pie of chicken and buckwheat with pickle-juice poured into the filling — the dish settled into its soup form only later. Molokhovets sets down that mature soup: her No. 37 builds a white beef broth around an ox kidney, salted cucumbers with their strained cucumber brine, pearl barley, turned root vegetables, potato and sour cream — essentially the Moscow-style rassolnik, which pre-revolutionary cooks made on kidneys and offal with abundant white roots such as celery and parsley root. She is codifying, not inventing, an old folk brine-soup tradition. The now-standard Leningrad barley version was a later, post-1917 Soviet simplification.

Ingredients

• funt beef
• ox kidney
• salt cucumbers
• cucumber brine
• herb bouquet
• baked onion
• funt root vegetables
• large potatoes
• tbsp butter
• tbsp flour
• stakan pearl barley
• stakan sour cream
• dill

Instructions

1. Clean and twice-blanch the ox kidney.
2. Cook a white bouillon; add kidney, herbs, root trimmings and cucumber skins/cores.
3. Stew turned roots and potato; cook barley; prepare cucumber flesh and boiled brine.
4. Thicken broth with a brine roux, add all elements and sour cream, boil, and serve over dill.