Botvinya (Cold Sorrel and Fish Soup)

History

Botvinya is one of the old cold soups of the Russian table, named for the botva — the leafy tops of root vegetables — and built by simmering greens such as young beet tops and sorrel, rubbing them through a sieve, and letting them down with kvass, then sharpening the result with cucumber, scallion, dill, and mustard or horseradish. It is attested as early as the sixteenth-century household manual Domostroy, and in old Russia it was a dish of the nobility, its prestige resting on the costly fish it was built around — sturgeon, beluga, and salmon. Its refinement showed in the service: it came to the table in three parts at once — the green kvass soup, the fine fish, and a bowl of crushed ice — and was reckoned incomplete without the fish. Molokhovets, the great codifier of nineteenth-century Russian gentry cooking, records this version rather than originating it: pureed sorrel let down with kvass, with poached salmon, whitefish, or crayfish tails and chopped ice offered separately, and an optional pour of sherry or champagne. So esteemed that it was remembered as "the queen of Russian cold soups" and turns up in nineteenth-century letters and literature, botvinya later faded; the food historian William Pokhlyobkin noted its decline in Soviet times on the cost of its ingredients and the labour of making it.

Ingredients

• funt sorrel
• fresh cucumbers
• handful green onion
• teaspoon salt
• teaspoon sugar
• teaspoon prepared mustard OR grated horseradish
• dill
• butylka (bottle) Bavarian kvass
• butylka (bottle) kislye shchi
• boiled fish (salmon, seersalmon, whitefish) or crayfish tails
• sherry or champagne (optional)
• finely chopped ice

Instructions

1. Cook sorrel in its juice, sieve; add cucumbers, ground green onion with salt and sugar, mustard or horseradish, dill.
2. Thin with Bavarian kvass and some kislye shchi.
3. Serve with separately boiled fish or crayfish tails and chopped ice; optional sherry or champagne.