Shchi? It looks unpronounceable* to the English speaker's eye, trapped by the double digraph. It’s just cabbage soup. It features enticingly, within cosy steamed-up café windows, in Hal Porter's The Paper Chase (see post July 9). For a couple of fleeting years, Melbourne’s late-1930s intelligentsia gathered at Café Petrushka, where discussions of fascism, philosophy, borscht, communism, and wall paintings forestalled looming premonitions of a new world war. Porter's autobiography exhumes artists, dancers, chefs, writers and drunks; and they live again, dustily, gold-specked, spectral, in the memory-shroud of history. The cafés owners bought their cabbages—and everything else for their kitchen—a few blocks away at the Victoria market. My grandmother shopped in those post-Depression days at the same market, approaching at a similar distance, but from the opposite direction. Cabbages, cabbages. Cabbages stacked in four-in-the-morning darkness by the sleepless; carried from t...
Recipes and ruminations from a small house in a big city.