Ice-Cold Schav Recipe (2024)

I grew up on this soup, and I love it. My Russian mother always added sour cream, and chopped cucumber in addition to the egg.

The best dishes are served with memories.

The first and last paragraphs of this piece are pure poetry. I could feel the heat described in the first as well as the sorrow and lack of hope in the last. I almost never read the recipe articles in the NYT because I've stopped trying to replicate the dishes. Too much trouble, too many ingredients, no interest - take your pick. This piece was about so much more than the food.

I usually give up on my sorrel plants by this time of year, assuming that the heat makes them too sour for the kitchen. Even though I made 3 or 4 pots of sorrel soup this past spring (Julia Child's recipe), I think I'll try this recipe. Any home cook with any yard space should grow sorrel. Very tough plant that comes back reliably year after year.

The recipe sounds great; the writing is amazing, visceral, you don't so much read it as gnash it. Please keep it coming.

My mother's family recipe included sliced cucumbers and scallions and sour cream. A boiled potato was served whole in the prepared soup. The perfect combination of creamy, salty, sour, cold and hot!

Sorrel is bursting the seams of my herb garden right now. I've made sorrel sauce for salmon twice now, and schav is next. Instead of water, I'm going to use goat whey, left over from making chevre, for additional tang, and a nice slightly milky background. Sweating the shallots and sorrel and then adding cubes of an already cooked potato means I won't need to boil the whey. Absent a liter of whey in the fridge like I have, a bit of yogurt stirred in would be a nice addition.

Gabrielle Hamilton, you are the best food writer in the universe! Schav takes me back because it's one of the Jewish foods my grandmother made that I could not wrap my brain around. I mean, liquid green? Ewww...I do love the sour, lemony freshness of sorrel when it's a sauce, but never a soup! I do like cold borscht (a dollop of sour cream, minced onion and cucumber, a cut of dill and please do not shake it to make it look like Pepto-Bismol) and that strange gefilte fish (I think you have to be born eating it) and now I'm going to give schav a try! I saw a bottle of the Gold's stuff on the shelf just yesterday but the military green color was too sad. Maybe they'll have fresh sorrel at the Greenmarket.

Because this article was so beautifully written, it could've involved cooked sneakers and I would've tried it.

I agree - this version is okay, but would be much better with the addition of dill, chopped cucumber, green onion, and sour cream added upon serving. My parents, also Belorussian, also served it this way whenever sorrel was available in the summer. Though not really necessary, I also sometimes replace some of the water with chicken broth to boost the flavor. When I serve this soup to guests, I call it Russian Gazpacho.

Never had schav but I have been that hot. Bravo!

A refreshing well written and interesting piece on cold soup. A time, not long ago remembered, of the way of life combined with the expected way of nature. Where are we now, but in a bowl of cold soup drowning in our own actions and forgetting our past ways.

A wonderful article and an excellent replacement of cold beet borshtsh [sic -- this is a phonetic spelling of the Russian word].
One reads, it is often called "green borscht", as a cousin of the standard, reddish-purple borscht soup. Sorrel soup is characterized by its sour taste due to oxalic acid present in sorrel. The "sorrel-sour" taste may disappear when sour cream is added, as the oxalic acid reacts with calcium and casein (http://englishdictionary.education/en/schav).

Refreshing and delicious. I will say (i) washing the sorrel (purchased at my farmers market) was a CHORE, and (ii) the additional time spent trimming the russet potato "into the shape of a rectangular box" was definitely not worth it (or necessary, for a home cook anyway).

a half pound of sorrel is a *lot* of sorrel. 100 good-sized leaves by my count. I never have that much at once. I made this with ~35 leaves, keeping other amounts the same, and used whey instead of water. Whey boils at a lower temperature, so be warned, the potatoes cook slowly (I'm at 5300 feet and it took ~25 min, 3x as long as with water) so you lose liquid, and it boils over easily. That said, after I added in some chicken broth to replace the lost liquid, it got great reviews.

I much prefer to maintain the vibrant green of the sorrel so I never heat it- which turns it so muddy looking. I like to throw it in the blender with the the cooked portion of the recipe. I also make a vichyssoise type soup, again throwing everything in the blender with a few handfuls of raw sorrel and a bit of cream. A bit of fresh Lovage is a wonderful addition.

This brings back hot New York childhood summers when my grandmother and mother made this. Luckily our local farmer's market sells sorrel, but I combine it with spinach. I always add sour cream and chopped cucumbers and salt.

If you don't want brown sorrel, add chopped sorrel at very end
so that it simply wilts.

Had a hard time finding Sorrel and only got 0.4 oz at Whole Foods, none available at Union Square market. Substituted baby Kale with fantastic results. Even with the substitute this dish is now on my short list of go to soups especially on hot stinky humid days!

My mother's favorite. Haven't had it in years, now I have to find it again. What memories. Thanks.

Never cooked Schav but ate buckets of it, made by my mother and my grandmother's cooks. Was always garnished with a huge dollop of sour cream, not an egg. My mother grew schav in our garden in northern Dutchess County until I stopped doing the stoop labor for her.

Two of my favorite cold soups are gazpacho and something the Bulgarians call Tarator which is a yogurt, dill, garlic cucumber soup. I make both of these soups all summer long, and they refresh as well as are very nutritious. They also use the summer produce in the stores.

Definitely this schav isn't any more Russian than the Russian dressing. For a cold soup-like Russian concoction try okroshka. As the name of this kvas-based dish suggests, one simply adds minced stuff (cucumbers, tomatoes, dill, hard-boiled eggs, garlic, etc) to kvas, throws in a dollop of smetana (very light cream cheese), and it's done. Kvas is available in the City at Russian stores, with variable sweetness. More tart variety is preferable.

Ms. Hamilton, your writing delights me! Any cooking essay that manages to reference 3-card Monty, the mutter museum, and Sorrel (my heart! I love this stuff) has my 2 thumbs up. Thank you!

How Chef Hamilton's writing evokes those oppressive dog days lived by a young adult city dweller in an AC-less apartment (in my case it was Boston's South End circa 1980), when one begs relief and finds it in a cold soup like vichyssoise, or borscht, or this crazy good schav. Sorrel is kinda rara avis, hard to find (farmers markets have made it more available now though) and even harder to cook with without its losing color and balance, but this prep works.

Sprinkling chopped sorrel stems over the soup? Ms. Hamilton, have you ever worked with sorrell? Sorrel stems might be tied together and boiled in the soup for extra flavor, but you'd have to remove them before you served it; they are tough and fibrous, nothing at all like chives.

What a great, evocative article! My parents often had a jar of that murky, drab green schav in the frig and I wouldn't touch it. Now I have sorrel growing perennially in my garden and I'm going to give your recipe a try!

Huge fan of sorrel here. While schav sounds tasty, I prefer the way I first tried it: in a thick sludge like creamed spinach prepared by a Hungarian girlfriend's mother. Several years ago, a nice Hungarian lady at a local market sweet-talked me into buying a kilo of it. Don't remember what happened with most of it, but the last few handfuls were tossed into a delicious stew I threw together with some fresh beans (purchased from the same nice lady) and simmered for a few minutes.