Solyanka Period COrigin theory CVerified

Solyanka is a strong, sour, richly filled soup rooted in the Russian table. A hearty bowl packed with meat, smoked meat, and sausage, it hits the tongue with salt and sourness at once. That sourness rises from brined cucumbers, the brine itself, olives, capers, and lemon, ingredients that store up salt and acid. It is often served with a spoonful of sour cream and a slice of lemon floating on top.

As for where it grew up, one account holds that it came out of the plain stews of village households and taverns (traktir). It is also said to have spread through the taverns as a cure for a hangover.

The core of solyanka's flavor lies in preserved foods. The brined cucumbers, the brine, the smoked meats, all were preserves that Russians had long kept on hand. Salting and fermenting vegetables and meat to keep them, that everyday wisdom is itself the backbone of the soup's flavor. Some sources say solyanka appears in seventeenth-century records as a hot single-pot dish of meat, brined cucumber, cabbage, and mushroom, but they do not name the document. By 1790 at the latest, the name and a recipe appear in print. Osipov's cookbook of that year has it under the name "selyanka": pickled cabbage, chopped onion, butter, vinegar, pepper, and finely cut ham, fried together in a pan. The Russian Academy dictionary of 1794 also has an entry, "solyanka, or colloquially selyanka," describing a dish seasoned with pickled cabbage, fish or beef, ham, vinegar, and pepper, and its 1822 edition carries the same entry. The fixed soup form we know is said to have taken shape in the first half of the nineteenth century, when cookbooks of the 1830s wrote it down.

The solyanka most people picture today is reddened with tomato. But that tomato was a latecomer to this dish. In Russia tomatoes first reached the upper classes in the eighteenth century, and they entered the pot as food only in the nineteenth century. The red solyanka is thus a relatively new face, and beneath it lies an older layer of flavor, one that stood on brined sourness and salt alone.

Solyanka's history comes with one claim set down by the food historian Pokhlyobkin: that the mid-sixteenth-century household manual, the Domostroy of 1547, already contained this dish.

Open that old text in its sixteenth-century manuscript version, though, and the word "solyanka" does not appear. Brine does appear there, as rosol (росол), but not solyanka itself. The food historian Syutkin rejects this sixteenth-century claim; according to him, the Registry of the Tsar's Dishes drawn up in the 1610s does not contain the name either, and Pokhlyobkin himself elsewhere wrote of solyanka as a seventeenth-century dish, so that his own accounts do not agree. Some sources place the dish in seventeenth-century records as a hot single-pot dish (some say the fifteenth century), but they do not name the document. The earliest text found so far in which the name appears is Osipov's cookbook of 1790, and its shape as a soup is said to have been set down in cookbooks only in the nineteenth century. The sour brined stew itself is old, but the claim that pushes it back to "a sixteenth-century text" lacks documentary support.

As for the name, two views still stand side by side. One is the "villagers' dish" reading, which ties the form selyanka to the words for "of the village" or "rustic," and sees a plain country hotchpotch of whatever was on hand, carried into the taverns, its name drifting from selyanka to solyanka. The other is the "salt dish" reading, which ties the present name solyanka to the word for salt and locates the essence of the dish in brining and sourness themselves. Neither has a decisive proof.

The two readings each look at a different side of the dish: one at a village hotchpotch of whatever was on hand, the other at brined sourness. Which of them gave the dish its name remains unsettled. And the red of the tomato is a later layer painted over the top.