Cucumber Soup

            My daughter issued me a challenge this morning, and being the competitive Alpha Male that I am I could not resist.

            While I was growing up in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, to give the city its full name [not just Sydney, Australia, which always pains me a little, for some reason. I mean one doesn't say "Sydney, Canada, does one? One always says: "Sydney, Nova Scotia."] [Anyway, I digress, a thousand apologies.] my grandmother, who was born in Krasnoyarsk, on the Trans-Siberian Railway, used to do all the cooking for the family. The family, at my birth, consisted of her husband, my grandfather, also born in Krasnoyarsk, my mother, Tamara, who was her eldest child, my Aunt Eara [short for Earaida, a truly beautiful name], her elder son, John, and her younger son, George. 

            I was born in 1940, and, at that time, Australia was at war. My father went overseas with the Australian Army in 1939, and while he survived the war, as far as I'm concerned, he never came back. He was assigned to command the Australian War Crimes Commission Army Unit after the war, and, at that time, he met an Australian Red Cross Army nurse, divorced my mother, and married her. Both my uncles served in the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] as mechanics. For some reason, they weren't sent overseas, probably because they were too young. My elder uncle was fourteen years older than I, and his younger brother was a year younger than that. Therefore, they would have been 19 and 18 respectively by the time the war ended.

Aunt Eara worked as a driver for the Australian Navy and my mother entertained the hundreds of US servicemen who ended up in Australia during the war, en route to some field of battle. I have heard rumours that this "entertaining," though perfectly innocent, according to everyone who knew, was the main reason my father divorced my mother. I mean, literally hundreds of servicemen passed through our house. I think the reason may have had more to do my matriarchal grandmother, who totally detested my father.

My goodness, how easy it is to digress, isn't it?! My grandfather, who had served as a captain in the Russian Imperial Army during World War I, tried to enlist in the Australian Army, but was rejected because of his age. So he joined the US Merchant Marine as an engineer type. He did fairly well, because, by the end of the war, given all the spare time they had at sea, he graduated from a correspondence school with a Marine Engineer's Degree, as well as a Diesel Engineering Degree. He was invalided out of the Merchant Marine in Manila with a hernia.

Anyway, Baboosia [which is Russian for "Granny," as opposed to "Babushka" which is Russian for "Grandmother" not the scarf she wears] did all the cooking. I mean, how could anyone else cook with all the duties, official or otherwise, that they had?  One of my favourite dishes [notice how I'm using the anglicised spelling?] was cucumber soup. It's truly a simple, nourishing, simple dish to prepare. It follows:

Take as much 85% or 90% ground beef as you feel you want to prepare. I usually use about 1½ pounds; add a little salt to taste,  and a little garlic powder and make it into tiny meatballs. Over a low flame, sauté them until they are just developing a crust. Remove from the frying pan, and add some chopped onions and a couple of cloves of sliced garlic. Sauté these as well until they just become transparent. Bung the whole lot into a nice large saucepan, and add water. Throw in a couple of bay leaves and some whole peppercorns. For about the amount of meat I recommended above, take about a dozen fairly small Kirby cucumbers, cut the stalk end off, and slice them into about ½-inchy slices. I recommend slicing off the stalk end and discarding it because it has a slightly bitter taste. Put about half as many sliced pickles into the mixture. Boil on a very low flame for about an hour.

Serve with sour cream and more sliced pickles. Just be careful not to bite into the peppercorns if you're delicate about them. I mean, you may not want to burn your mouth. Personally, I love to crunch them up and eat them, but I know not everyone has the same tastes that I do.

So there it is. Of course, that wasn't the first thing she taught me to cook; that was scrambled eggs when I was six years old. But, who doesn't know how to make scrambled eggs?