It behooves one to have some food constructs up one’s sleeve that one can pull out at will and riff on: recipes that allow for variations on a theme, often more of a narrative than a list of ingredients and instructions for their combination. Such is the case for what I’ll here call sour cabbage soup.

What I’m going to tell you about here was at one time based on a variant of Schchi, a Russian cabbage soup that, in Cyrillic, only has two letters (yep, there’s a single letter for “shch”). Most Americans likely think that Russian classic soup starts and ends at borscht, but I say, Not so! Not so!

My Russian boyfriend’s mother used to concoct a brutally good schchi, always served with a beautiful, green-tinged broth, black bread, tubs of sour cream. Her version involved chunks of meat, mine doesn’t.

A couple of years ago I tracked down a schchi recipe on the intertubes and started messing with it. The first cabbage soup essential here is to recognize that you’re working with time here. Letting the tick of it going by make your cabbage sing and grow up and grow assertive.