Cooking with Nettle

Ah, spring, when nature wakes from its winter slumber, and the farmers markets come alive with fresh greens like spinach, sorrel, and green onions.

You probably won’t find the subject of this column at the farmers market, but it’s often available in the wild to anyone willing to search for and pick it. Believe it or not, cooking with nettle is an ancient tradition, dating back hundreds of years, and Russia is far from the only country that uses this green.

That said, the Leo Tolstoy Estate and Museum at Yasnaya Polyana organizes an Annual Nettle Festival, and its staff has collected more than a hundred recipes that use nettle, ranging from soups and baked goods to sauces and drinks.

For the average Russian, the words “cooking with nettle” conjure up the image of the nettle soup that is usually made in spring and early summer, while the plant is still young and has not yet acquired its bitter taste. Both for the peasants of centuries past and for the Soviet citizens of the twentieth century, nettle soup provided the first vitamins of the spring, after a long winter of root vegetables and pickles.

But nettle soup was not just peasant fare, as young nettle is actually prized by cooks for its taste.

The first printed recipe for nettle soup can be found in the Cookery Notes book written by Sergei Drukovtsov, published in 1779. It is very concise, advising the cook to “take nettle, parboil it, chop it up, put it into some effervescent kvas, add some beef, Ukrainian salo, and cover with white broth, then add stuffed eggs.”

Vasily Levshin’s Culinary Dictionary, published some 20 years later, provided a more detailed recipe for a spring greens soup, using nettle as an example. It suggests cooking the nettle with butter for a better taste and adding enough of the greens to the soup to make it really thick.

St. Petersburg Cooking, by Ignaty Radetsky, published in 1862, is justly considered the height of Russian culinary thought for its time. Radetsky too offered a recipe for traditional nettle soup, although he gave it a French name, potage d’orties. He also calls on cooks to sauté the nettle until soft, and advises stuffed eggs and pork sausages as additions to the soup.

There’s also a very detailed recipe in the 1899 tome Practical Foundations of Culinary Art, written by Pelageya Alexandrova-Ignatieva, but it is a rather time-consuming one. The recipe I am sharing comes from my mother, and it is both simple and straightforward.

If you don’t have access to nettle, or don’t want to deal with it, feel free to replace it with spinach and/or sorrel. If you do decide to surprise your friends and family, keep in mind the following rules for cooking with nettle. First, you only use the smallest, youngest leaves, the top four or five. Second, you have to use gloves to pick the leaves, as even the youngest nettle can prick. Third, before cooking with nettle, you have to parboil it, or simply pour boiling water over it. After that, wring it and pat dry with a paper towel. Now it’s ready to be cooked.

Nettle / Sorrel / Spinach Soup

2 potatoes

1 onion, chopped fine

1 leek, chopped fine

1 carrot, chopped fine

1 clove of garlic, minced

3 boiled eggs

1 bunch nettle

1 bunch sorrel

½ cup other greens (dill, parsley)

3 tbsp olive oil

Chop the onion and leek, grate the carrot, and mince the garlic. In a pan, sauté the onion in olive oil, then add the leek, garlic and grated carrot.

Cut up the potatoes (into about one-inch squares). Add 1.5 - 2 quarts of water to the pan with the sautéed vegetables, fold in the cut potatoes and bring to a boil. Salt and pepper to taste. Cook until the potatoes are done.

Meanwhile, wash and prepare the nettle/sorrel/spinach, chopping it up fine. When the potatoes are ready, place the greens into the pan. Cover, bring to a boil, and turn the heat off.

The soup is served with sour cream, halved boiled eggs, and chopped parsley and dill. You can also make this vegetarian version into a meat lover’s soup by adding pre-cooked beef or chicken broth in place of water.