Soup Opera --- Mother Fehr's Borscht with Oxtail

This is Harry's mother borscht recipe.   It was my first time cooking oxtail.   It has a very distinctive smell and taste --- mmmm.  

Ingredients:
2 packages beef short ribs, with bone and fat (about 8 pieces)
1 package oxtail pieces
10 whole pepper corns
2 bay leaves
1 star anise
10 whole allspice
kosher or sea salt
1 small green cabbage
4 yellow waxy potatoes
1/2 yellow onion
1 bunch flat or Italian parsley
1 carrot (optional)
no celery
5 large fresh tomatoes (or frozen)
1 bunch fresh dill
1 cup whipping cream

Instructions:
Brown the meats in a very hot cast iron frying pan in butter and garlic.
Put the spices in the spice ball.
Put the meat and spice ball into a large soup pot, cover with cold water, and simmer for 2 hours.  Check and top off the water to make sure the meat is covered.
Remove the meat and set aside.
Cut up the vegetables and add to the water.   Add salt.  Top up the water (always cold water), and simmer for 1 1/2 hours.  
Check seasoning and add salt if required.
Add tomatoes, fresh dill and whipping cream, bring to a boil and turn off the heat.  If the tomatoes are frozen add them earlier and break up with a wooden spoon.

Summer, Sorrel or Green Borscht (Zumma, Zuaromp or Jreena Borscht)

I have been meaning to add this recipe because it is a good spring and summer recipe. It's called summer borscht because you use fresh greens. They didn't have greens in winter in the old days. It is also considered a spring tonic or cleanser.

One essential plant for home gardeners is a sorrel plant. It is hardy and comes up early so you can make fresh soup and salad in early spring. Sorrel leaves are also great in salads and can be used in sauces for fish.

As kids we used to eat zuaromp in the garden all the time. The taste is tart and lemony. It was decades before I realized that the English name was sorrel.

The French use sorrel in sauces, maybe someone can share their favourite recipes.

You should be able to easily find fresh dill and parsley in your local store, but summer savory you may have to grow yourself from seed and freeze. If you don't have any, leave it out, but make a note to buy some seeds next year.

Summer Borscht

Ingredients:
Ham hock with bone or 4 beef short ribs with bones
4-5 large potatoes, preferably Island ambers or other waxy potatoes (red ones work too), diced with peel
4 cups fresh sorrel leaves (can be frozen)
1 bunch fresh dill, chopped
1 bunch flat Italian parsley, with stems, chopped
1 bunch green onions, chopped
10 or more peppercorns
1 bunch fresh, frozen, or dried summer savory
Sea salt (to taste)
Sour cream or heavy cream

Instructions:
Simmer a meat in a large pot of water for 2 hours. This can be done the night before.
Cool in the frig overnight or go straight to the next step.
Remove the meat and bone from the pot and put it on a plate.
Cut the meat off the bone, cut into small pieces and add back to the soup, leaving a bit of fat if you like it. Discard the extra fat, skin and bones. I can never resist a few nibbles of the fat first though. Don't skim the fat from the stock because it contains nutrients and adds so much flavour.
Wash 5 large potatoes, trim any blemishes, cut into 1 inch pieces and add them to the soup. Don't peel the potatoes.
Chop parsley including stems, and add to the pot.
Chop dill removing thick stems and add to the pot.
Chop the sorrel leaves
Put peppercorns and summer savory into a spice ball and add to the pot.
Depending on the saltiness of the ham, season the soup with salt.
Simmer until the potatoes are done, about 30 minutes.
Turn off the heat, and when the soup has cooled slightly, add cream or serve on the side at the table.

Serve with Perfect Kneadless Brown Bread on the side and a dollop of sour cream on top.

Notes:
Cousin Betty always uses an onion and a full tablespoon of peppercorns.
Marina also adds beet leaves.

Related Posts:

Valencia's and Eduardo's Yerba Mate with Cinnamon and Star Anise

Yerba mate is consumed all day in Paraguay. It is a mild herbal tea that contains caffiene. Our bus driver had a cow horn guampa (cup) with bombilla (metal straw with strainer at the end) in his hand all day. In Paraguay everyone shares the same cup and it is considered rude to refuse and offer to sip the tea. You need the bombilla to strain the straw out of the tea.

Our bus driver filled the whole guampa with what looked like a lot of dry straw and kept topping it up with water (he also had a separate open air unairconditioned compartment on the bus and didn't come down with a cold like we did from the super air conditioned main compartment bus).

The "hotel" lady filled his 2-gallon thermos with hot water in the morning and later he filled it with cold water for the afternoon. A doctor at the hospital told me that the main benefit of this tea is hydration in the 40 to 50 degree F. heat. He shrugged off the shared cups as "community immunity".

Joan's Instructions:

In a tea pot, add a broken up cinnamon stick and one star anise. The Yerba Mate comes in tea bags so you don’t have to drink it out of a guampa with a bombilla (those can stay on my mantel just for show). I have a pair of them with the bombilla in them beside the old photos of Harry’s dad and the Guarani Indians in Paraguay. Nancy (Valencia) and Eduardo taught me how to drink it like this. It is quite tasty this way and is healthier than green tea --- full of antioxidants plus whatever is in the cinnamon stick and anise. Try 100% Organic Mate Factor Yerba Mate brand.

Loris' Sister Corrine's Rhubarb Plauts

While fresh rhubarb is still plentiful, it's time to make plauts --- that once a year sweet-sour treat.

Plauts or streusel cake is quick and easy to make and can be made with plums or other tart fruit as well as dry cottage cheese. The combination of sugar and extremely sour fruit is irresistible.

Plauts is faster and easier to make than pie, especially in large quantities so it was and is often served at family gatherings, funerals and weddings.

In the old days, it was common to make just one dish of whatever was fresh and available and that would often be the entire meal, even if it was all dessert. The women had so much work to do, and there were so many hungry men and kids to feed, that they had to be efficient. Of course, they had to use up what they had and not waste any food.

I like to think that they instinctively knew that one had to eat seasonally to get the best nutrition and they certainly knew the taste was better. With no frigs and freezers, there was really no choice about eating what was plentiful in season.

I love the succession of summer fruits and tend to make whole meals out of whatever fruit is in season. Rhubarb is followed by strawberries, raspberries and blueberries. Summer brings cherries and blackberries, and then in late summer peaches, apricots, plums and pears appear, followed by apples in the fall. Bringing home a big box of fresh berries from a farm stand is a great excuse not to make the usual full dinner meal.

I also have a few plants of raspberries, blueberries and strawberries and the first person out in the garden in the morning can eat a handful of unbelievably sweet fruit for breakfast.

My mother always canned rhubarb in syrup, and that was a common Sunday afternoon faspa for visitors, served with Bothwell cheese, grandma's double buns (tviback) and coffee (kind of an afternoon tea). Every home had a large fancy glass bowl with a matching set of small fruit bowls, just to serve such preserves. At grandpa's house, we weren't allowed to have more than one thing on the buns. Take either cheese or jam or butter. Even having all two or three on the table was not approved of. It was a voluntary restraint and a lesson that I can appreciate now.

Nowadays you can freeze rhubarb, chopped, in airtight plastic bags, so you have it on hand any time for pie, plauts, brown betty and sauce.

This Rhubarb Plauts recipe is Loris' sister Corrine's recipe. Loris swears it's the all time best recipe and I have to agree. The various Englander that pass through my house are also very impressed and ask for the recipe. I used butter and increased the amount of rhubarb.

I really like the slightly sour cottage cheese taste in recipes so I made cottage cheese (gloms) plauts. It was delicious and satisfied my cravings. The rhubarb is the winner for me though. Some of the curds baked into hard kernels so the recipe set out below is in development. Suggestions to improve the results would be appreciated.

Corrine's Rhubarb Plauts --- the recipe

Dough
2 cups flour
1-1/2 cups sugar
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. baking powder
2/3 cup margarine

Mix until crumbly. Reserve 3/4 cup of the crumbs for the topping.

Add:
2 eggs, lightly beaten with
1 cup milk

Mix and pour into an greased 9" x 13" pan.

Sprinkle with 2 cups chopped rhubarb.

Crumb topping
Add 3/4 cup sugar to the reserved crumbs and sprinkle on the rhubarb.
Bake at 350 degrees F. for 50 minutes.
Drizzle with icing sugar while still warm.

Gloms Plauts
(from Mennonite Foods and Folkways of South Russia)

Dough (for this step I used the dough recipe from the Rhubarb Plauts recipe above)
3 cups sour cream
5 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
Flour to make dough you can roll.
Filling (for this step I followed the recipe but left out the lemon and vanilla as I don't imagine they had those in the old days)
3 cups dry curd cottage cheese (fine)
4 eggs
1-1/2 cups sugar
rind of 1 lemon
1 tsp. lemon extract
1 tsp. vanilla
Crumb topping (again I used the recipe for rhubarb plauts above)
1/4 cup butter
3/4 cup flour
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 salt

Bake at 375 degrees F. for 40-50 minutes. (I followed the baking instructions for rhubarb plauts above)

Dried Bean Soup with Pork Hocks

Dinner tonight is pork hocks and white bean soup. I am using the old Mennonite recipe, but using black beans instead of white beans, because that's what I have.


I got lovely fresh pork hocks from Stongs, very cheap. You can also use ham or smoked pork.
I put the beans to soak this morning, then cooked them and the pork hocks in two separate pots in the afternoon. Does anyone just use one pot?  If I am working all day, I cook the beans and meat the night before.


I put peppercorns and bay leaf in a spice ball and simmered with the meat. I also had summer savory in freezer bags from last summer and tied up a bunch with string and threw that in. You can just throw it in loose, but I don't like picking out the stems.


Once the meat is falling off the bones, I'll take it out, cut it in small pieces and serve it separately or put it back in the soup. I'll add an onion, fresh parsley, and salt and the beans to the soup.  I have no parsley from the garden yet so have to still buy it at Youngs. So many recipes call for a stingy tablespoon of chopped parsley, which is ridiculous. I use a whole bunch for soup, and of course it has to be the flat leaf Italian kind. I love the taste and parsley is a top 100 food. Did you know it kills bacteria on contact?


The recipes from Mennonite Treasury of Recipes and Mennonite Foods and Folkways from South Russia (henceforth known as MT and MFF) both call for 1 Tbsp. white vinegar. I am not sure what that does, but will try it.


The recipes also call for cream or sour cream to be added to the pot but we always put it on at the table in our house.


I made this soup again just recently using organic pork hocks from Famous Foods and Great Northern Beans and only one other ingredient --- frozen summer savory from the garden (plus salt).  Great Northerns are very flavorful and cook faster than other beans.  I cooked the unsoaked beans for two hours and cooked the pork with herbs in a separate pot at the same time.  Then I took out the meat, cut it up and put the small pieces back into the stock. I drained the beans and added them to the soup with 2 tsp. salt.  It lasted 4 days and fed a guest one night as well.  It was so wonderful I anticipated it all day at work. 

Ingredients:
8 cups water
4 pork hocks
3 cups dried white beans
10 peppercorns
1-2 dried or fresh bay leaves
1 onion, chopped
1 bunch summer savory, fresh or frozen
1 bunch flat leaf parsley, chopped with stems
1 Tbsp. salt
cream or sour cream (optional)

Instructions:
Soak beans in a large quantity of water for at least 4 hours, depending on the type of beans. Drain the beans and reserve.
Put the peppercorns and bay leaves into a spice ball.
Simmer pork hocks and spice ball in the 8 cups water for 2 hours to make the stock. Remove the meat and set aside.
Add onion and beans to the stock and cook until the beans are tender.
Add parsley, summer savory, and salt and cook another 10 minutes.
Serve soup in bowls with a platter of meat, sour cream and brown bread on the side.