Okroshka Period COrigin theory CVerified

Okroshka is a cold, chopped broth, thinned with the fermented drink kvass or with cucumber brine. It has long been a Russian home dish eaten in the height of summer, cold and without recourse to the stove.

The older layer of this dish is said to reach back to the medieval Volga region. One tradition holds that the burlaki, the men who hauled barges, would soak dried fish in kvass to eat it, and that this was the beginning. The oldest form that can be traced with certainty in writing appears in a book of household management written by Nikolay Osipov in 1790. The okroshka described there is finely chopped roast meat, onion, cucumber, and sour cream, thinned with cucumber brine or kvass; the now leading role of potato is nowhere in it yet.

The diced-potato okroshka eaten ordinarily today is a newer form, distinct from that older one. Potato is a crop brought from the New World, and it began to spread in Russia after 1765, when the Senate sent seed potatoes and a manual on growing them to every province. In Molokhovets's 1861 cookbook, A Gift to Young Housewives, boiled potato goes into the recipe for meatless okroshka (the recipe for meat okroshka has none). By that year at the latest, an okroshka with potato had been set down in a cookbook. The diversifying of the liquid, thinning with kefir or mineral water in place of kvass, is likewise a modern spread. The framework of the dish, a cold chopped broth in kvass, is old, but the crowded bowl we picture now is better understood as something laid on top of that framework afterward.

Okroshka today all but always has diced potato in it, and it is easy to imagine it eaten in just that form ever since medieval times. But a book written in 1790 stands in the way of that picture.

Potato is a crop that came from the New World, and it took a long time to take root in Russian fields. In 1765, under Catherine II, the Senate sent a detailed manual on growing and using it, together with seed potatoes, to every province. It was from there that potato began to spread through Russia. The potato version of okroshka, it is fair to assume, grew up somewhere inside that long spread.

One cross-section of that stretch survives in the book of household management Nikolay Osipov wrote in 1790, a quarter of a century after those manuals went out. The okroshka described there is roast meat, onion, cucumber, and sour cream thinned with kvass or cucumber brine, with no potato anywhere in sight. This is the oldest record of the dish that can be traced in writing, and even at that point it lacked potato.

That does not make the dish itself new. The framework of a cold chopped broth thinned with kvass is said to reach back to life in the medieval Volga region, and its age is not in doubt. What must be kept apart is the age of the dish as a family and the newness of the crowded bowl common today. Fold the two together and call it "the same since medieval times," and the order of events gets reversed. Onto an old framework, the potato and the varied liquids of a later age were laid, and today's form was built up: the bowl of 1790 shows us the very bottom of that layering.