Lenivy shchi.

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 the fields of the Goulburn Valley by grim-lipped truckers; planted hard-months earlier by broken-backed farmers. The human handlers who will soon take an overseas holiday, like their fathers in 1914-8. 

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Café Petrushka was situated in Little Collins Street, off Russell Street, where the Russell automatic telephone exchange later stood; and in the shell of which, even today, you can buy a converted apartment, walk down windswept Little Collins Street, and shop for cheap cabbages and other vegetables at the Victoria market.

Lazy cabbage soup ('lenivy shchi' in The Paper Chase).

Simmer half an onion, a stick of celery and a bay leaf in stock, your own or cubed.

Meanwhile sauté a grated carrot and a diced onion in oil until soft, then stir through a generous tablespoonful of tomato purée.

When cooked, remove cooked vegetables from stock and add the sautéed vegetable and a couple of cubed potatoes depending on size.

Simmer fifteen minutes, then add a cupful of shredded cabbage. Simmer until cabbage is cooked.

Serve with sour cream.

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*Unpronounceable? A voluptuous, soft, drawn-out sibilant, like the title of the Charles Aznavour song. Sometimes English is more romantic when sung by the French. Odd.