Not just Perepichka. Alla Zakonova wrote a history of delicious Kyiv and its cuisines — grandmotherʼs and restaurant ones. Babel publishes an excerpt from it

Sometimes, the greatest discovery — amidst the variety of dishes and tastes — can be something as familiar and casual as soup. As Peter Weil wrote: “In our time of existential loneliness, there is no foundation stronger than a pot of thick, hot soup.” That’s the whole point — a surprise where you least expect it, a discovery in familiar territory. A familiar stranger. Another the same one.

You can find your own unique soup in your grandmotherʼs recipes, meet it on a trip, taste it when you visiting someone. Get to know it, love it, search for it again, try it. Try to recreate it in your home kitchen. Hone and improve it to find the golden formula and immortalize it in a handwritten recipe book, and love it for life.

For my mother, that soup was the “solyanka” at the “Dynamo” restaurant in 1962. At the time, my mother was a graduate student at the university, living in a dormitory, and it was probably the first time she had received an invitation to a restaurant.

It was located on the green Petrivska Alley near the “Dynamo” stadium, the restaurant of the same name was a masterpiece of the short era of Ukrainian constructivism — the brainchild of Joseph Karakis. He is a world-class architect, a follower of Corbusier and Wright, the author of the Officersʼ House and the River Station.

Although, my mother didnʼt know all that yet. She was in her early twenties, studying mathematics, singing in the Academy of Sciences choir, falling in love, and inhaling of Kyivʼs vibe — with its spacious streets, parks, and beaches, concerts, and movie premieres.

The American musicals “Sun Valley Serenade” and “Oklahoma” were being shown in the cinemas, and the masterpiece “Chasing Two Hares” had just been released. The American jazz orchestra of the "king of swing" Benny Goodman played five concerts in the recently built Sports Palace.

Kyiv in 1962 was developing before our eyes. The first metro line from the “Vokzalna” station to the “Dnipro” station had already been launched. The surrounding areas were being built up en masse — Chokolivka, Nyvky, Darnytsia, followed by Syrets, Vidradny, Borshchahivka, and Rusanivka. The "Rockets" — the first hydrofoil passenger river vessels in the USSR — were launched from the River Station.

Of course, the most respectable rest was in restaurants. There were no more than two dozen of them. The best ones are located in picturesque places.

The legendary “Riviera” in Pioneer Park on the slopes of the Dnipro River is still operating. “Praha” at VDNH is experiencing its golden years. The floating restaurant Poplavok on the embankment opposite Trukhanov Island is incredibly popular. In the Holosiivsky district, the “Dubky” restaurant welcomes guests (later it will be renamed, and the new “Dubky” will open in the 1970s on Syrets).

“Dynamo” occupies a special place. Itʼs a three-story building — modern, contemporary. Later it will become the unofficial club of the main Kyiv football team, but for now it is a favorite restaurant of the nomenclature elite and a fashionable place for dates.

The menu is small, following Soviet tradition. The signature dishes are chops on the bone, "Dynamo beef" — beef baked in pots with vegetables and mushrooms in a white sauce, and “solyanka” (this one wow-soup, momʼs revelation). It was with olives, which she tried for the first time then.

The menu had a generous assortment of several types of meat — boiled and smoked. It served with lemon and sour cream in one plate. For a young girl who experienced the war as a child and the post-war famine as a teenager, it was an incredible gastronomic experience. So “solyanka” deserves a separate, detailed story.

“Solyanka”

From a peasant girl to a young lady. Restaurant hit of the 1960s—1980s. Dream olives

The classic meat “solyanka” should contain at least 3 meat products (corned beef, ham, pork, boiled sausage, tongue, sausages, roasted veal, veal kidneys). The liquid content is one third less than in other soups. Olives and capers are added at the end of cooking. It served with sour cream, chopped herbs and a slice of lemon.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, a dish with similar ingredients was called "selyanka" — from "selyanska" (like, a rural one) — i.e., a simple thick soup, meat or fish, from everything in a row. Over time, "selyanka" transformed into "solyanka" according to the taste — salty, sour, lemony.

“Solyanka” was cooked in Kyiv taverns and restaurants as a hot appetizer, as an accompaniment to vodka and an anti-hangover soup. Later, it moved into home cooking as a post-Christmas soup made from leftover holiday food — sausages, ham, tongue, olives, capers, and lemons.

In Vera Yaschynskaʼs cookbook "Rational Nutrition" (1929), the meat “solyanka” includes a strained beef and root vegetable soup, which is poured over "a plate of finely chopped meat of any kind: boiled or baked beef, veal, chicken, ham, goose, duck, sausages".

Add finely chopped pickled cucumbers, olives, mushrooms, pickled mushrooms or boiled porcini mushrooms, cucumber brine and fresh steamed cabbage. Pour the soup over all this, add sour cream and bring to a boil.

"When serving, add green to the bowl, and if you like, green onions."

In Soviet cooking, “solyanka” became one of the ceremonial first courses — hearty, spicy, with an impressive set of ingredients. It is represented in all editions of the "Book about Tasty and Healthy Food".

In regulatory documents for catering establishments, the composition of "Combined meat solyanka" includes beef broth, boiled meat, sausages or sausage, sometimes beef tongue. It also contains pickled cucumbers, tomato paste, capers or olives. The soup is served with an olive, a slice of lemon and a spoonful of sour cream.

Capers were often replaced with finely chopped pickles, and olives were only found in "first-class" restaurants. Such as the “Dynamo” restaurant, where in the early 1960s my mother first tasted a large, fleshy olive in her first hodgepodge. That “solyanka” from “Dynamo” became the standard in our family.

In Soviet home cooking, “solyanka” determined prestige and status. It was a special dish for holidays. It provided for scarce ingredients. It had to be at least three types of meat products: boiled meat (beef or pork), smoked meats (sausages, sausage, sometimes brisket), offal (tongue, possibly kidneys). It also had to contain tomato paste (rare in the 1970s) and seasonal pickled cucumbers, so as lemons. Although, the most important sign of quality were olives.

In the Soviet lexicon, olives and black olives were always considered different products, but botanically they are the same plant, the fruits of which are harvested at different stages of ripening.

In daily life, the word "olives" became a symbol of something foreign, imposing, fashionable, delicate and festive. They were imported from friendly countries — Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Greece, but supplies were sporadic and unstable.

So olives were bought on occasion, in advance of the holidays, and were given out in New Yearʼs rations along with caviar and champagne. A tin can was kept for years for a special occasion, although for the general public the taste of olives was "bitter" and "incomprehensible".

Sometimes an olive (only one) was placed in the center of an “Olivier” salad — like a cherry on top. It was a visual signal: "Itʼs all serious here." Only in the early 1990s did people taste that olive as a snack with a martini in the first cooperative cafes.

Weʼre back from olives to “solyanka”. In Soviet times, it was prepared for major holidays or as a way to use up holiday meat leftovers. In times of food shortages, “solyanka” turned into a primitive copy of a luxurious dish. For a meat one was used "tushonka” and cheap "varenka" sausage, and for fish one — canned fish. Instead of tomato paste was used ketchup. There is no mention of olives and lemons. It was made more sour using vinegar.

True meat “solyanka” appears in respectable restaurants of the new wave of the 1990s, where cooperators, bandits and officials go. Nostalgia for the USSR is in fashion, with appropriate symbols and names of dishes.

In the early 2000s, when olives, lemon and tomato paste were no longer in short supply, “solyanka” continued to be prepared as a traditional home-made dish (no longer pretentious, but just festive), usually for the cold season.

In the restaurant business, saturated with global trends, foreign impressions and new products, “solyanka” remained rather an anachronism, a concession for nostalgic solvent customers, along with Kyiv-chicken or mushroom julienne.

Over the past 20 years, “solyanka” has once again proven its vitality and versatility. It exists in a simplified format (chicken + sausage + cucumber pickle + lemon + herbs + a spoonful of sour cream) or fusion with seafood, cherry tomatoes and lime.

Although, the best — of course — is momʼs homemade one, accompanied by aching memories of Kyiv, when the trees were tall and sturgeons were in the Dnipro River.