dand, most of the time, etymology seems to irrefutably solve the dilemmas of the origin of a preparation, the science that studies the history and the phonetic and semantic evolution of the terms may not only prove nothing, but even confuse them even more.
If in our country and not only (the Middle East and most of the Balkans) the sarma is clear as day where it comes from (Turkish sarma – to wrap, to fold which comes from Farsi, old Persian) or in the case of the Caucasus or Sweden ( from the Turkish dolma - to fill or from the Armenian tolma is based on two Urartian linguistic roots "toli" which means "vine leaf" and "ma" which means "wrapped") to the Slavs the story is completely and utterly crazy [1].
They call the sarmals pigeons. The term undergoes phonetic changes depending on each language: Голубцы [Golubtsy] – Russia, Gołąbki – Poland, Голубцы [Holubtsi] – Ukraine, Галубцы [Halubcy] – Belarus, Holubky – Czech Republic and Slovakia.
In Lithuania they are called balandėliai, which, in literal translation, also means pigeons. In the case of the other two Baltic countries kapsarullid in Estonian, kāpostu tīteņi in Latvian seems to translate: stuffed cabbage rolls.
How the sarmals got to Russia
There are two currents of opinion that analyze how sarmals[2] arrived at the courts of tsars and in the humble households of Russian peasants. The first of them speculates that the sarmaua/dolma came with the Tatar-Mongol invasions of the 13th century. Although migratory, the Tatars (Turkic people) ate rolls of rice or lamb in vine leaves. Arriving in the northern space, far above the areas suitable for growing grapes, they replaced the classic leaf with what they had at hand: the cabbage that grew in abundance.
The second hypothesis places us somewhat more recently, in the 18th and 19th centuries, when French gastronomy was in great demand in the cuisine of the tsars. Thus the Russians fell in love with a dish in which pigeons were wrapped in cabbage leaves and then cooked. Their wrapping has several explanations: 1. To protect sensitive flesh and skin from direct fire. 2. To prevent drying and keep flavors inside. (We talk about these techniques in another chapter)
The third hypothesis, neutral, the reason why I didn't put it in the first calculation, says that the sarmals arose out of necessity to use the remains. However, I think this direction is wrong, because with sarmals you need the best cabbage leaves (though you fill them with anything, even leftovers from the previous meal). Moreover, in Russia there are several dishes from the same big and beautiful family: cabbage + minced meat + rice:
the sarmales of the sloth in which the cabbage is chopped and mixed with pre-boiled rice, ground meat, onion, garlic, herbs in a composition that is then shaped into meatballs and fried directly in the pan.
A soup-stew that we could call Cabbage soup in Cluj, a dish of deconstructed cabbage rolls - an improper term because they were not originally built, (unstuffed cabbage rolls soup) but in which the term cabbage rolls is used to easier to identify the taste it should have. It should be noted that this soup/stew (the differences are exactly like the goulash that you can cook in both versions) seems to be an adapted version of the famous Shchi – a cabbage soup (fresh or pickled) with various other vegetables (potatoes, carrots) , onion), mushrooms (often rehydrated) and even meat, extremely common and with a history that seems to last since the 9th century[3].
It should be noted that both rice (which is not and was not grown in Russia) and tomatoes (often replaced by a cream-based sauce) made the classic dish out of everyone's reach due to the expensive raw material.
There is, however, the possibility that sarmales were invented (in a primitive, unchiseled version)/became a preparation that capitalizes on leftovers if we identify fortuitous recipes (of those not found in cookbooks, non-standardized or standardizable), in which you can see the poverty of the ingredients or the confusion given by the total non-conceptualization of the filling. The words of a Romanian stand-up-er after he saw a show in which Jamie Oliver cooked with leftovers from the fridge. He remarked that the TV star was cooking with the leftovers from his fridge, not with the impossible-to-join leftovers from a shared fridge of a single young man.
But let's go back to the pigeons. History says that they were replaced over time and as possible with other types of meat and were called false pigeons. Gradually, the recognizable planetary composition was reached.
A tale of swaddled birds
To my surprise, but also to my great joy because it greatly eased my work, I found the study of Mrs. Alexandra Grigorieva, University of Helsinki, called Rich Man's Fowl, Poor Man's Fowl: What's under the Wrapper? and presented at the conferences: Wrapped and Stuffed Foods, Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2012:
"Maestro Martino prefers to wrap the birds in vine leaves and flavor them with salt, fennel and a little fat before cooking them on the fire[4]. In recent centuries bard[5] has become the main technique for cooking small birds or leaner cuts of meat.
Sometimes (if the size of the birds allows), avoiding direct contact with fire can be achieved by even humbler means, as in the case of the Sicilians, where one of the prized regional recipes (beccaficu 'nna a cipudda[6]) specifies placing the birds[7] in hollowed out onions and baking them in hot ashes. Or, note the elegance of Escoffier[8], who roasts damson plum halves with a little butter and then puts an ortolan[9] wrapped in vine leaves in each half and roasts for another four minutes (ortolans aux quetsches[10]. It is worth noting that, while the Sicilian recipe recommends eating the onion (the part without the ash) Escoffier insists that the plum inside which the ortolan is served on the table (after a sprinkling of agurida juice and salt) must be left uneaten”.
Possibly, as in many other cases of mimetic cuisine, those who could not afford such delicacies used meat substitutes, but served them all the same. Many times, continues Alexandra Grigorieva, even refer to them by pointing out the fake. "Such wrapped and stuffed 'birds' can be found in many European kitchens. In fact, there are at least three "families" of such dishes that I could find.
The first family of "false birds" is the most numerous and extends from France and Italy to Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Germany (especially the south), Belgium, Holland and even Latvia, not to mention England (although it is more difficult to be recognized there). However, the earliest examples called aloes or "larks" come from late medieval France and 14th and 15th century England. They are actually small steaks wrapped around highly seasoned fillings and then broiled and fried. This is actually the origin of the English expression «beef olive» and also of the French word aloyau (or bavette d'aloyau[11]). In modern France, delicate beef rolls stuffed with salt pork and herbs in a rich wine and tomato sauce are a regional specialty of Provence, often available in local butchers'.
Later, Alexandra Grigorieva, tells about the comments in the footer of recipes variation on the theme where the veal and ham roll is filled with boiled eggs and which is recognized under the names of nid de pigeon ("pigeon's nest") or nid d'hirondelle ("nest of swallow").
"Another recipe is called moineau sans tête ("headless sparrow") which indicates its origin not from Provence, but from Flanders, northern France or French-speaking Belgium where such beef rolls are also called "headless birds", (oiseaux sans tête) and are supposed to be stuffed with ground meat and cooked in a beer-based sauce.
In the Flemish part of Belgium and Holland, such meat rolls are called blinde vinken ("blind finches", probably because they obviously have no heads). There is also a Belgian specialty called vinken vrac ("crazy finches"), a beef roll wrapped around a strip of bacon. And the recipe for slavinken (a mysterious word again involving "finches") in Holland actually eliminates the beef roll, it's just the minced meat filling wrapped in bacon, although when I talked to one of my Dutch-born friends in the de Jos in 1933, she insisted that this was how vinken blinds were made and sold at the butcher shop in her day.
Some similar recipes exist in Scandinavian culinary cultures. Norwegian cuisine has benløse fugler ("boneless beef birds"), also very popular with American families of Norwegian descent. The original way to make benløse fugler was to roll thin slices of well-beaten beef around pieces of bone marrow or minced pork fat, tie with a string and fry them with some cheese, and this is usually done in USA (predominantly bacon-stuffed). However, in modern Norway the slices of beef have largely been replaced by ground beef, so that the "boned birds" in question actually turned into oblong meatballs filled with marrow or chopped bacon. Rather like in modern Holland, where the fake version of minced beef birds has become more popular than the original beef rolls.
In Denmark there is a splendid variety of fake birds: benløse fugle ("boneless birds"), forloren kylling ("fake chicken") and forloren and ("fake duck"). "Boneless birds" are usually meatballs made from thin slices of beef wrapped around a thin piece of carrot with some bacon or solid lard. These are cooked in a concentrated broth, which is then transformed into a classic, thick, brown Danish sauce to accompany them alongside their usual side dish of mashed potatoes. "Fake chicken" is made of light veal stuffed with parsley and a bit of butter, the usual summer stuffing for fried chicken. Like the summer chicken, it is served with a salad of fresh sweet and sour cucumbers and new potatoes, with a lighter colored sauce, but of the same type as for the "boneless birds", with perhaps a little cream added. "Fake duck" is made with pork stuffed with apples and prunes and served with brown sauce, sweet and sour red cabbage and potatoes, a classic Danish side dish for duck (although it's pork - yikes!)
Icelandic cookbooks include both beinlausir fuglar ("boned birds") and fölsk önd or gerviönd ("mock duck" or "pretend duck"), as well as fölsk gæs or gervigæs ("mock goose" or "goose pretended"). However, such dishes are now considered quite old-fashioned and are not widely known in modern Iceland. "Boneless birds" are rolled with slices of bacon, tied and boiled, and can be made with almost any meat: lamb, beef, veal and yes, horse (very popular in Iceland), but never pork; the pork was rare. "Fake duck" was made with roast beef or horse stuffed with prunes and sometimes apples, browned and boiled and served with more prunes and apples and vegetables. "Fake goose" was a kind of bread filled with dried apples and prunes and then baked.
In Latvia there is a similar dish called "false partridge", a veal roll stuffed (and held in place) with a strip of smoked bacon, stewed with root vegetables and served with cream sauce enriched with cheese. In Germany, such "birds" are mostly unspecified, although I found recipes for "Spanish birds" (all kinds of beef or veal rolls that can be filled with fatty sausages and pickles, ham and pickles, and even anchovies/anchovies) which should be traditional in the Czech Republic as spainské ptáčky (in German Spanische Vogel / Vögerl). There are also some German Vogelnest ("bird's nest") recipes for meat rolls with eggs, but mostly that name is reserved for cookies. The most popular name in Germany for such dishes seems to be Kalbsvögel ("veal birds"), veal rolls stuffed with everything from bacon, onions and herbs to whole hard-boiled eggs and ham or even spinach and ricotta . Kalbsvögel are generally recognized as the regional specialty of Swabia, Baden-Württemberg, southern Germany.
Veal and beef rolls are also quite popular in Austria. Heinz-Dieter Pohl, in his comprehensive work on Austrian food words, lists Vögerl ("small birds"), Kalbsvögerl ("small veal birds") and Rindsvögerl ("small beef birds") as separate entries, although he references them crossed as "a kind of roulade". However, the two Kalbsvögerl recipes featured in a classic book on Viennese cuisine are not actually rolls, but thin slices of veal cooked with aromatic vegetables and tomato sauce or boiled separately and then finished with mushrooms sauteed in butter, so so that they are not always or wrapped.
In Switzerland, the name of such veal rolls changes to Fleischvögel ("meat birds"), and they are popular in many cantons. In Valais, the southwestern Swiss canton bordering Italy, they have been eating this dish for centuries: there is, in the archives of the city of Brig, a recipe for it from 1581. Its title is Vögell auss kelberem flaisch zue braten (" To roast veal "birds") and recommends pounding a piece of veal with a knife until tender, seasoning it with cinnamon and ginger, and stuffing it with kidneys and a sprig of rosemary. Nowadays there are countless regional variations: Appenzell cantonal stuffing can include Mostbröckli (beef tenderloin) and Appenzeller cheese, in Glarus they are made with goat cheese, carrot and celery, the modern Valais cantonal stuffing often includes ham, sausage and asparagus. Other popular ones include bacon, white bread, parsley and carrots, but new variations can include many vegetables and even fruit (the Swiss food magazine I got this information from recommends orange slices in particular).
In Italy, the common name for mock-fowl meat rolls since at least the 17th century was uccelli / uccellini / ucelletti scappati ("fleeing birds"). They are made with veal or pork, often wrapped in bacon and sage leaves, the filling can include bacon, mortadella, liver (and other types of offal), fried in butter and stewed in white wine, concentrated soup or just water and unlike of all the other "birds" presented previously, here several are cooked and served on a skewer like serving small game. Such "birds" are particularly popular in northern Italy in Lombardy, but also in Emilia-Romagna. A more unusual recipe can be found in Pellegrino Artusi's fin-de-siècle (19th, of course) culinary masterpiece, the first great cookbook of a truly united Italy: it's called tordi finti ("imitation blackbirds") and describes exquisite milk veal rolls stuffed with minced chicken liver, anchovies, bacon and juniper berries (to enhance the "blackbird" flavor), wrapped in sage leaves and bacon and fried until golden, then finished with a little cheese and and served hot or cold on toast.
That's all we've found so far about the first family of false birds. The second family is much smaller and more uniform, predominantly Slavic. Cabbage rolls in Central and Eastern Europe are actually called "little pigeons": golubtsy / halubcy / gołąbki, etc. It is an old word, and for example in Russia, people who eat sarmales (golubtsy) do not realize that their name is related to the Russian word for pigeon - golub'. Apart from Russia, such cabbage "pigeons" stuffed with meat and rice can be found in Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and Eastern Slovakia (especially within Roma communities). They are also present in Lithuanian cuisine as balandėliai (which also means "little pigeons"). Unlike sarmales from Hungary, Romania and the "pigeons" from the Balkans, they are prepared mainly with fresh cabbage, not sour cabbage. Fillings can include wheat, buckwheat or barley instead of rice, mushrooms and herbs can be added, and the sauce they cook in varies from cheese and cream to tomato.
While researching, I stumbled upon Dalmatian sarmales called arambašići, quite unusual because the filling doesn't include rice, just lots of rich meat (cubed, not minced) seasoned with cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves and smothered with even more meat smoked or sausage. I was so pleased to find something not called dolma, sarma, yaprak (and their translations and derivatives) in the Balkans. I was extremely enthusiastic when I learned that in Croatian arambašići means "bandit leaders / partisans". However, I later discovered that a variant of the Croatian arambašići recipe is popular in Friuli, Italy, on the border with Croatia. There the official name of the dish is rambasicci, but it is usually referred to by a more familiar name, just uccelli scappati nella verza ("fleeing birds" from Savoy cabbage). And in any case, it is far from the Dalmatian military cabbage rolls: the filling is minced meat, it has no spices, the cabbage is fresh (a local variety) and after the sarmales are stewed in the soup, they are (unimaginably!) sprinkled with parmesan and breadcrumbs...
Another curiosity I identified related to sarmales and mock birds is called cuib de cinci, a truly royal dish from a poor Romanian household described at length by writer and gastronome Radu Anton Roman. It consists of five sauerkraut sarmals cooked in a rich sauce, all wrapped in a larger sauerkraut leaf like a nest and presented as such. Fillings include 1) poultry, smoked goose pastrami, bread, goose fat 2) pork, smoked pork bacon and rice 3) veal, bacon, rice 4) mutton, bread and butter 5) mushrooms, rice and broth, all delicately seasoned and enriched with various herbs and vegetables. I feel like this recipe takes the expression "making slaves in the kitchen" to a whole new level... So, in a bizarre way, even if Romanians don't call their cabbage rolls "little pigeons" there is the idea of making a nest for They.
Another surprising recipe to mention, this time from Gascony, France: poule verte ("green chicken") and which means stuffed cabbage. It is an imitation of the famous poule-au-pot (chicken in the pot) designed to provide both a soup and a main course in one go when there is no real chicken to use. A large Savoy cabbage is blanched[12], cored and the resulting cavity filled with aromatic vegetables browned in duck fat mixed with moistened stale bread, eggs, leftover ham or bacon, herbs and spices[13]. Then, it is "covered" and cooked in vegetable soup, with many vegetables cut into large pieces, until the cabbage is ready and the flavors combine. The broth (juice) is served first, then the sliced "green chicken" is served as the main course, accompanied by vegetables from the soup and a spicy tomato sauce or just mustard and pickles. This is an authentic recipe from rural Gascony, the other "green chicken" recipes I found on the internet are quite different: cabbage rolls stuffed with pork and stale bread and cooked with lard (which rather indicates the idea of economy, of recycling leftover ingredients) in a similar soup and with a very bizarre cold bread, made with sausage meat, eggs and chopped sorrel. However, pork replaces chicken on every occasion, so there is a kind of continuity for all three. This "green chicken" seems to be a tradition in its own right, at least I haven't been able to discover any connection with other neighboring culinary cultures yet.
I have come to the last family of false birds, which is not yet a family, as I have only been able to find one suitable term to represent it. It's a Piedmontese recipe called flisse o grive ('flisse de mierle') and consists of minced pork and calf's liver brains together with juniper, nutmeg, eggs and a little parmesan, wrapped in breadcrumbs and fried. The word flisse is problematic, could it be a corruption of Fleischvögel (Swiss-German) from across the border? Or is it somehow related to the old Frankish word flikka meaning side of bacon (ie flitch)? However, the point is that similar recipes for organ bundles wrapped in yair prapure (caillette, attriaux, etc.) are very numerous in the regions of Switzerland and southeastern France that once belonged to the Duchy of Savoy.
In short, what we learned is that any coating will do, any stuffing will do – our culinary imagination will turn the result into a delicious bird”[14].
In addition to the study above, I would add a situation encountered in Italy[15]. Although there are also quite a few different recipes, the research leads us to the conclusion that sarmales are "more specific" to the northern area, especially Piemonte. They are called Caponet/ capunêt – derived from clapon[16] – castrated rooster, and seem to have entered the local culinary heritage with the Ukrainian migration to the area, from the mid-19th century[17]. The local recipes use classic ingredients, but the differentiating ones that emphasize the local particularity, use leftovers of already cooked (minced) beef and sausages. In Piemonte, rice is not traditionally used, unlike the version in the province of Vercelli, also in northern Italy, among the European regions with the oldest traditions in its cultivation. Recipes from the area use sausage meat. But, in order not to deviate from the theme of this chapter, I would like to point out another case: in Novara, also in Piemonte, sarmales are called Quagliette (small quails).
From what I understand from my research, limited to what I could find in English or how good I was at using google translate, it seems that a lot of Slavs are sore at the elbow of being promised pigeons and getting sardines as much as time are delicious. Less the authors of the polandunraveled.com site who also suffer that the terminology is not authentically Polish, well, even worse, tragically I could say, that it is borrowed from the Ukrainian neighbors: .
"First of all, you should know that the word «gołąbek» has a double meaning in Polish. It is, of course, our wonderful dish, but it also means pigeon. This can confuse a lot of people, including Poles who often question this strange name choice. There is, however, an explanation for this crazy linguistic story: the word «gołąbek» came to Poland in the 19th century from Ukraine, where a very sophisticated dish called «hołubci» was served during aristocratic holidays and parties . It consisted of a pigeon stuffed with other wonderful things and wrapped in cabbage leaves. The idea of hołubci came to Poland and was not only translated but also adopted by the poor masses. The pigeon was replaced with much cheaper minced meat and rice (the poorer the cook, the more rice would be added to the dish) and only the original cabbage wrap was kept”.
On the other hand, even if the Polish linguistic map indicates this trajectory and these times (are there any archaisms???) the popular imagination has created a myth that the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, Casimir IV, fed his army with gołąbki before a key battle of the 13 Years' War outside Malbork Castle against the Teutonic Order in the second half of the 15th century. The only victory anyone has ever had against the Teutonic Knights is attributed to the power-giving properties of this hearty meal.[18]
On a different note, right at the moment I am writing these lines (10.11.2020) I am sitting next to Mihnea, my good friend. He grew up in South Korea and at that time they had a Polish family friend – Peter (while I am writing these lines, Mihnea is attending his funeral online, who died of Covid-19). Well, although in Peter's house sarmales were cooked, he was crazy about the Romanian version made by Mihnea's mother.
Returning to ours, I must mention another roughly similar situation encountered in South America. In Argentina, sarmals are called niños envueltos (wrapped children - I'll come back another time), but the polysemanticism doesn't stop there: under the same name we find (especially in Chile) a dish similar to the fake birds above: pieces of veal rolled around some fillings and sloshing in sauce. Such overlaps are frequently encountered in Latin America[19]. For example, in Mexico niños envueltos means a sweet roll. In other Hispanic countries, for example the Dominican Republic, this roll is called Brazo Gitano (gypsy's arm). We, in Romania, have the gypsy muscle which is not related to the cuisine of the Roma, but was named so by the fluffy boyars who likened the beautiful piece of meat to the athletic and extremely hard-working body of the gypsy slave. In other Central and South American countries niños envueltos can mean any type of roll (we meet them more often under the name rollitos) and which can be from spring rolls to bread appetizer pancakes[20].
The onomastic epic can continue in another direction. In Syria, for example, but we meet the story in many Levantine or Arabic-speaking peoples, we meet the term Yalanji which indicates vegetarian sarmales. Literally, yalanji means a lie, and in the case of the preparation, it indicates a surrogate, a twisted wire, which can fool you due to the fact that it does not have the composition in sight.
If you're not beautiful crazy people who like to split the gastronomic thread into four, I've probably already bored you a bit with this foray, and maybe it was nice of me to tell you that at the beginning of the chapter. But, so that you can see that I am still a good boy, I am letting you know right now that the story is not over and that there are quite a few lines to come about the internal controversy of the Russians regarding the etymology of the term golubtsy.
Photo 102058365 © Janna Danilova | Dreamstime.com
[1] Exceptions are the South Slavic languages – Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Macedonian, Serbian Montenegrin and Slovenian
[2] Source: https://www.rbth.com/russian-kitchen/329327-homemade-russian-cabbage-rolls
[3] Source: https://www.olgasflavorfactory.com/recipes/soups/shchi-russian-cabbage-soup/
[4] Maestro Martino da Como, Libro de Arte Coquinaria, Terziaria, Milan, 1990.
[5] Bardare is the wrapping of chicken, turkey or even pork meat in lard, skin or goiter, without being limited to these parts. I called these because they are fatty parts. The purpose of brining is to add more flavor, flavor and juiciness to lean meat. Most often you'll find baring done by securing the slan with toothpicks, but an elegant baring is done by tying with kitchen twine, which is resistant to roasting, baking, scalding, braising, and even grilling if indirect heat is used. Adrian Hădean via https://www.europafm.ro/dictionarul-gastronomic-cine-stie-ce-este-bardarea/
[6] Anna Gosetti della Salda, Le ricette regionali italiane, Milan, Solares, 2003
[7] Warbles in original. After a discussion with Doru Panaintescu, we agreed that our correspondents could be lacar, silvie or pitulice, stufarica or grelušel
[8] George Auguste Escoffier (October 28, 1846 – February 12, 1935) was one of the most important French chefs, considered the father of modern gastronomy. He continued the work of Marie-Antoine Carême who laid the foundations of Haute Cuisine, but modernized and simplified his ornamental cuisine
[9] Small bird, garden sparrow
[10] Escoffier, Le Guide Culinaire, Paris, Flammarion, 1993
[11] A specific butcher's cut
[12] Scalding
[13] It is a variety of chou farci that we discuss in detail in another chapter, it is mentioned here because the name is related to birds
[14] Alexandra Grigorieva, University of Helsinki, Rich Man's Fowl, Poor Man's Fowl: What's under the Wrapper? Wrapped and Stuffed Foods, Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2012
[15] Thanks to chef Marco Favino for the information
[16] it. cappone, fr. Chapon, here the term has Polish etymology - kalpon
[17] https://www.acanadianfoodie.com/2014/11/22/cook-italy-caponet/
[18] https://www.polishfest-ny.org/
[19] https://www.chileanfoodandgarden.com/chilean-steak-rolls-ninos-envueltos/
[20] https://www.cocinadominicana.com/61/nino-envuelto.html
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