Cabbage Soup

Cold weather is upon us here in Boston, which means soup. I actually made this soup the day before Sandy came to Boston, as I still had quite a bit of cabbage left from my Farmer's box. This cabbage was huge. I wish I had a picture. It was actually half of a head of cabbage, and it weighed in at 5 lb 14 oz, making the entire cabbage ~12 lbs. Craziness. So, with all this cabbage I needed to do something. I called my mom, and she told me to e-mail my aunt for the recipe for my great-grandmother's cabbage soup. Here it is. I'm transcribing it from a handwritten recipe, so I'll try to leave the idiosyncrasies in. I think it was written down by my grandmother, based on the bizarre underlining, but it's legible so I'm not sure.

1 large head cabbage (4 or 5 lbs) (n.b. my pot could only hold 4 lbs)
4 or 5 medium boiling potatoes
1 pint heavy sour cream
3 sour salt chips, which is called sour salt (can only be bought in a Jewish store) (n.b. Despite living in Brookline, which is home to quite a few Jews, I couldn't find sour salt. The internet told me it was citric acid, so I just used a lemon)
6 very large size onions
1 tablespoon or more salt (to taste) (6-8 qt size pot)

Shred cabbage with knife (not fine) and put into large pot with (more than to cover) water

While that is boiling peel potatoes and insert right in pot in quarters

While this is boiling brown onions VERY brown (n.b. this is excessively underlined) with LOTS (n.b. again, very underlined) of butter and when real brown pour in the sour cream (something illegible) and on LOW FLAME (n.b. again, underlined, you don't want to curdle the sour cream) mix all liquid.

These are my onions. They're pretty brown, but I got bored. Getting your onions really brown takes quite a while. I think this was after 30 minutes.

Merge together very well until no liquid in pan.

Pour back into soup. Not a high flame (or cream will curdle), but low simmer. (Scrape all brown from pan and pour into soup). Remove the potatoes and smash and insert in soup.

Add sour salt to taste (one nice size or 2 small ones) just to give it a little tart and cook one hour.

All in all about 2 hours of cooking time.

My soup. I toasted some rye break to go with it.