Eat Your Blues Away

Two hundred years ago, the poetic Russian word golubtsy had many meanings. It could refer to various items with a pleasant tint of blue in them: ladies’ ear rings, fur collars made of blue fox, or blue-grey horses. But it could also mean a dish of cabbage leaves filled with meat, probably because of the slight touch of blue on the stewed leaves (which beginners in cookery, believing so fervently that anything palatable must have a rosy or yellow touch, are so afraid of).  

Whatever the reason, it’s not obvious why and when cooks borrowed the word golubtsy to christen this dish. Nor do we know the exact date of their first breakthrough to the Russian dinner table. 

After all, the word kapusta (cabbage) has been borrowed on too many occasions, and the associations it generates are not always poetic. For instance, it is the new slang word for money, a kind of Russian equivalent of ‘dough’ — maybe because, for the new generation of Russians, cabbage leaves are reminiscent of crisp new bank notes. 

Whatever the origins of the word, one thing is sure —golubtsy, the dish, came to Russia from the Caucasus. Georgian and Azeri cooks have a national dish called dolma — similar to golubtsy but with vine instead of cabbage leaves. 

No sooner had Russian cooks decided to assimilate dolma, however, than they were faced with the problem of finding vine leaves. The problem was that grapes simply don’t grow in the north! Therefore, ingenious Russian gastronomists found an adequate replacement — cabbage — of which Russia rarely has a shortage. 

Cabbage can be legitimately called Russia’s national vegetable. It would be hard to find another cuisine in the world with so many cabbage-based recipes. Russians can do anything to cabbage: salt it, boil it, even fry it. Cabbage is one of the main ingredients of shchi and solyanka soups and can be one of the fillings of pirozhki (pies).

Slavs began growing cabbages in the 9th century, when they were brought over to what is now Russia from the Black Sea region by Greek and Roman colonists.

A few centuries later, Russian princes paid tribute to each other by giving away not just coffers full of precious stones or oriental racing horses, but also garden plots planted with cabbage. Thus kapusta began to spread. Foreigners who came to Russia were stunned by its prevalence in villages, where peasants ate it twice a day. Even today, the average Russian eats seven times as much cabbage as the average American.

No one will argue that cabbage is a very healthy product with many healing properties. Its juice is believed to help in weight-loss programs and in the 1940s doctors discovered that it could help cure ulcers. That’s probably why Soviet servicemen were fed on golubtsy. Later, in the mid 1950s, golubtsy ceased to be a delicacy and became instead an accessible popular dish.

Admittedly, in the so-called stagnation period, “the distribution process went too far” — to use a bureaucratic cliche of the day. In other words, the otherwise empty shelves of Soviet stores were filled with canned golubtsy imported from Hungary and Bulgaria.  They  were not as tasty as the home-made ones, so foreigners who came here thought that golubtsy were a second-rate product. If you follow our recipe closely enough, you’ll realize this isn’t true.

— Yelena Utenkova

Ingredients:

For every 2 lb. cabbage (serves 3-4):

1 lb. beef or other meat

One half a cup of rice

1 medium-sized onion

5 tbsp. sunflower oil
(2 for frying the golubtsy,
3 for the filling)

1 cup of sour cream

2 tbsp. tomato puree

Salt and pepper to taste.

To make the filling:

Wash a piece of boneless meat, chop into small pieces and put through the mincing machine (you may also purchase ground beef or meat). Add boiled fluffy rice and finely chopped onion fried in sunflower oil. Add salt and pepper to taste and mix well.

Strip the cabbage head of outer leaves, cut off the stump, then drop the head into boiling salted water and boil for 10-20 minutes. Then put the head in a sieve, let the water drain, dissemble the leaves and cut off the stalk with a knife.

Put mince (quantity according to taste) on the cooked cabbage leaves and wrap in the leaves, trying to elongate the golubtsy in the process. If you are unable to do this neatly, you can tie up the golubtsy with ordinary thread, but don’t forget to remove it when the golubtsy are ready.

Fry the golubtsy lightly on both sides in sunflower oil in a frying pan, put in a shallow saucepan, add sour cream and tomato puree, put on the lid and stew over a low flame for around 30 minutes.

Put the cooked golubtsy in a dish and add the sauce in which they were stewed.