Baked Sauerkraut Solyanka with Canned Fish
Taste the sauerkraut before you do anything else. It ranges from mildly tangy to fiercely sour, and if yours is the second kind, rinse it in cold water and squeeze it dry — 600 g (about 1 lb 5 oz, roughly four cups drained) of sharp kraut will punch straight through everything else in the pan. Braise it until it is genuinely tender, because it won’t soften further in the oven; the breadcrumb crust colors long before that.
Solyanka is a name that covers both a sour soup and this layered bake, and here it is the bake: cabbage, then fish, then sautéed carrot and onion, then cabbage again. The pickles get their own little pot of water for a reason — they shed some salt and stay crisp, so you can still taste them as pickles in a slice rather than as part of the general mass. Peeling and seeding the large ones removes the slippery part.
A few details that change the result:
- The margarine is a period detail; butter or a neutral oil tastes better, and you need fat both for the pan and for drizzling over the top.
- Any tinned fish in tomato sauce works — mackerel or sardines are the easiest Western equivalents of the saury and goby used at home. The bones are cooked soft, so lay the pieces in whole instead of mashing them.
- The top layer must be cabbage. Fish left exposed on the surface dries out under the crumbs.
Part of Ukrainian cuisine — 464 more recipes in the section.
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Ingredients
Instructions
Melt the margarine in a pot, add the onion and carrot cut into strips, and sauté.
Add a little water to the squeezed-out sauerkraut and braise until softened.
Slice the pickled cucumbers (best peeled and seeded), put them in a small pot, add water, and stew gently.
Mix the canned fish with the cucumbers.
Grease a pan, dust it with breadcrumbs, lay down a layer of braised sauerkraut, then a layer of fish with cucumbers, cover with a layer of sautéed onion and carrot, then another layer of sauerkraut.
Smooth the surface, sprinkle with breadcrumbs, drizzle with melted fat, and bake in the oven.
Decorate the top with lemon and cucumber slices, and serve straight from the pan.
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