Cabbage Pie, for Grushenka

Portrait of the artist's sister Luigia (1875), by Luigi Nono

In a note to the reader at the beginning of The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky introduces the book as a biography of his hero, Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov. Alexei (Alyosha) is one of four sons (all with dead mothers) of the boorish, sleazy and embarrassing rapist Fyodor Karamozov, whose murder is the event around which the story unfolds. Out of the brothers Alyosha probably is the most heroic. He’s miraculously wholesome and a superfan of the local monastery. Dostoevsky says that he’s far from a great man and perhaps couldn’t even be considered noteworthy, yet Alyosha’s the kind of guy who will stop to talk to a kid who’s getting bullied, and then the kid will nearly bite his finger off, and then that sets off a whole side plot. One of my favourite things about reading Dostoevsky is that most of the plot happens from the characters walking around and visiting different people. Sometimes they might hire a troika. It would be a great open world videogame. Alyosha is a man of action in an interactive, plot-advancing way, in contrast to his brother Dmitri who is on a drunken and/or horny rampage for much of the book. The other legitimate son of Fyodor is Ivan (educated, tortured, superior, annoying) and the fourth son is the bastard Smerdyakov (obtuse and conniving, but makes excellent cabbage pies).

I’m no literature scholar, but it’s not lost on me that the father Fyodor shares his first name with the author and that Alexei was the name of Dostoevsky’s son who died in infancy. Reading with this in mind it’s quite moving to think of him giving life to his dead son through the characterisation of Alyosha, the sweetie-pie holy fool who everyone loves. Dostoevsky planned a sequel following Alyosha’s story which is foreshadowed a lot in TBK, but never wrote it. He died pretty young (late 50s) but perhaps even if he’d lived longer he wouldn’t have written it anyway - he was a prolific novelist and as far as I know none of his other works had or were sequels. Anyway TBK ends with a bit of a cliffhanger and I wish I could find out what happens next. I would inhale any news of Alyosha, Ivan or Dmitri, heck I’d even read about what the sanctimonious, jilted Katerina Ivanovna is getting up to. But more so than anyone else I want to know: what happened to Grushenka?

You could say that Grushenka is the femme fatale of TBK. She’s the twin flame of the impulsive, lusty Dmitri and in some ways also his foil. He’s a reckless spendthrift and she’s a savvy hustler, he’s painfully devoted to her and she’s aloof (until she gets sucked into his drama and locks in for the ride). She also seems likely to fuck his dad early on, although I interpret this as a bit of storytelling intrigue from the omniscient narrator, a resident of the village who remains anonymous. The narrator actually throws a lot of shade about Grushenka, always qualifying descriptions of her good looks with caveats that she has the kind of beauty that will fade fast. She’s somewhat notorious around the village for being the kept woman of a local merchant many years her senior. As a teenager she was seduced and dumped by an officer, then abandoned by her family. This random old merchant took her in and taught her how to make money buying and selling promissory notes, then conveniently became infirm and died while she was still in her early 20s.

We first meet Grushenka in a scene with Katya Ivanovna (Dmitri’s fiancee who he’s barely interested in) where she’s being a fake-ass bitch pretending that she’s there to make peace, just so that she pull the rug out from under Katya and tell her that actually no, she thinks she’ll keep seeing Dmitri because she maybe likes him, but hasn’t decided yet. A catfight ensues. Dmitri is kind of a loser and I don’t really know what either woman sees in him (many such cases), but without the love triangle he wouldn’t be a very interesting character. Grushenka is very callous in using her sexuality to manipulate men and torture Katya, but she has a softer side that comes out when she meets Alyosha and speculates that she’s probably going to go to hell, but holds onto hope that she at least has one scrap of good in her. Gradually the narrator reveals that she actually hasn’t been sleeping with anyone since her sugar daddy was last virile (I mean in a modern context who cares, but back then it probably would’ve been a bridge too far) and that she never had any interest in getting with Fyodor for his estate, or Dmitri for his potential inheritance, as she has her own money and can take care of herself.

As a character of the fallen woman/loose woman/kept woman type, I find Grushenka to be lightyears ahead of the sad holy sex worker/poverty martyr Sonia in Crime and Punishment (which is however a better book overall, so if you’re going to read one make it that). Grushenka is always starting shit! Grushenka has a past that doesn’t define her! Grushenka gets to make choices and then to reconsider and pivot! All through the book I was asking, where is Grushenka? What is Grushenka doing? For a while it does look like she will have the same fate as Sonia (following her convict boyfriend to Siberia) but at the end it’s heavily implied that she and Dmitri are going to escape together. I don’t see them having a happy future together, they’re both way too volatile. Maybe if they did make it to America the culture shock would’ve pushed them together for a while. They do really love each other, but Grushenka’s already been through a big infatuation and heartbreak before and I’m not convinced that this is different enough to have a different ending. Also if they had kids Dmitri would have some massive trauma to contend with around fatherhood. The happiest outcome I can think of is if she taught him to fend for himself then they went their separate ways. But even today, good luck getting a man to learn something from a woman.

Grushenka admits that she’s not a good person, but at least she gave an onion. And for Grushenka, I give a cabbage pie. Delicious cabbage pies are mentioned twice in TBK and I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I checked out some modern Russian recipes for cabbage pie which were more like a quiche - a batter with eggs and sour cream, poured over chopped cabbage and baked. I took a stab at what kind of recipe book people would be using in the 1870s and hit upon Elena Molokhovet’s A Gift to Young Housewives, first published 1861. You can read all of the recipes at molohovetc.ru. Molokhovet’s has a recipe for cabbage pie filling, and an “excellent dough with sour cream”, both of which I halved. As usual with old recipes they assume you already know how to make a pie, which is not true of me, so I had to read some additional information.

Here’s my half-cabbage, salted and left for 10 mins, then poured over with boiling water and squeezed out.

Here’s what it looked like after I cooked it down with an onion and some seasoning. After that it went in the fridge to cool (the filling must be completely cold) and I added 2 chopped boiled eggs.

Here’s my dough- 56g of butter rubbed into 1.5 cups of flour and a pinch of salt, mixed with 125g of sour cream and one egg.

Here it is rolled out and filled, then made into a pie. My pinching is very rustic.

The book said to cook it hot at the start and then medium, for 30-40 minutes. Here’s how it turned out:

I got excited and cut it too early and juice came out. It was fantastic on the first night, then the second day I got the ick about eating the bits of boiled egg and just picked them out. Reheated in the oven it was still great. If I was making this again I’d experiment with the filling - I keep thinking cabbage and walnuts. Maybe some breadcrumbs to soak up the cabbage juice. The pastry was easy to make and turned out really good, it would work for both savoury and sweet.

За здоровье Grushenka. Hope you made it to heaven baby.

What would you put in the pie with the cabbage? Sound off below Purgies!