Savoy Cabbage Soup: “Kol MeVaser” (קול מבשר) from Hoshanah Rabbah at the End of Sukkot to the Messianic Recipe of German-Speaking Jewry

The deepest theological yearnings of German-speaking Jewry were once expressed not in a poem, but in a pun about a poor man’s soup eaten on Hoshanah Rabbah (the final day of Sukkot): Kol meVaser (Voice of the Herald) or, to the ear, Kohl mit Wasser (Cabbage with Water). (In High German, “Kohl” refers specifically to savoy cabbage, not generic cabbage; ordinary cabbage is “Kraut.” This distinction is crucial for the pun.)

These introductory notes dive into the history, Kabbalah, and Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of the Messianic to reconstruct a traditional Jewish recipe that is, today, whispered more often than it is cooked. We trace the linguistic pun connecting a poor man’s soup to the “Voice of the Herald” announcing redemption, confronting a tradition that survives only by word-of-mouth in communities from Bnei Brak to Vienna.

​[Jump to the Recipe]

The Lost Voice of the Herald: Reconstructing an Obscure Jewish Soup

There’s something profoundly unsettling about trying to understand a culinary tradition that may never have existed quite as you imagine it. For years, my work felt like an act of culinary fiction, reconstructing a dish from linguistic puns and historical context alone. Yet, the act of attempting to capture it—to finally write down a recipe for this phantom soup—is itself an act of redemption. This isn’t mere recollection; it is the culinary equivalent of Walter Benjamin’s revolutionary Jetztzeit—a moment where a hidden, fragile memory suddenly bursts into the present, blasting open the continuum of comfortable forgetting. This custom is, in fact, very much alive: it’s a well-known practice today in communities spanning the globe, from Williamsburg, Boro Park, and Bnei Brak to Vienna’s Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community. My own family, too, has maintained the habit of eating Kol meVaser soup on Hoshanah Rabbah. The problem, for all of us, was the same: while the custom to eat the dish is clear, there was no specific, written recipe. In fact, many in the ultra-Orthodox community will tell the story of this custom at the Hoshanah Rabbah table—explaining the pun and the historical background—but not actually serve or eat the “Kol meVaser” savoy cabbage soup itself. It wasn’t until about ten years ago, when I started this blog and its ensuing reflection on Jewish Viennese and German-speaking Jewish cuisine, that I finally decided to formalize and fix our own family’s recipe, breaking the chain of the unwritten tradition.

The line between fiction and culinary archaeology has just shifted, anchored by a single, crucial citation: I found one written source for the custom to eat the Jewish savoy cabbage soup, “Kol meVaser” (or Kohl mit Wasser), on the holiday of Hoshanah Rabbah in Yalkut Minhagim mi-Minhagei Shivtei Yisrael, p. 24.

This discovery doesn’t prove the tradition was widespread, but it confirms its existence. The project transforms from pure invention to the delicate work of piecing together an obscurely documented practice. In my Vienna kitchen in the Jewish quarter of Leopoldstadt—the neighborhood known to the local community as Matzo Island, and heartbreakingly referred to after the war as the “island of shattered glass”—I am preparing this dish born of this ambiguity.

My current interpretation is a contemporary, deeply flavorful broth. While the linguistic pun denotes the elemental “Savoy Cabbage with Water,” the spiritual importance of Hoshanah Rabbah meant families would have added whatever bones, meat scraps, or fat they could afford for the holiday meal. In this vegan reconstruction, savoy cabbage simmers with water, red miso standing in for the deep, long-simmered bone flavor, and dried porcini offering the necessary umami that elevated this meager dish into a festive one. This soup is a tangible link, a reconstruction that attempts to amplify a historically muted sacred message, a whisper that was nearly silenced entirely.

The Sound of Sacred Wordplay and the Messianic Hope

The origin of this phantom soup lies in a linguistic miracle rooted in deep messianic yearning. The Hebrew phrase “kol meVaser”—literally, “voice of the herald”—appears in the Hoshanah Rabbah liturgy, expressing hope for Elijah the Prophet’s announcement of the final redemption.

In the Ashkenazic and Italian rites, the hoshanot (seven liturgical circuits and prayers) are specifically accompanied by a series of liturgical verses, written by the poet Rabbi Eleazar birabbi Qallir, which climax with the electrifying line: “Kol meVasser, meVasser ve-Omer” (The voice of the Herald heralds and says). This chant is a fervent prayer for the speedy coming of the Messiah, making the phrase a profound articulation of hope amidst historical suffering.

To German-speaking Ashkenazi Jews, this powerful sacred incantation began to sound suspiciously like an elemental dinner: Kohl mit Wasser (Savoy Cabbage with Water). In High German context, Kohl always meant savoy cabbage, never generic cabbage; this precision made the pun resonate and guided which vegetable was eaten. Here is where the linguistic and botanical archaeology becomes crucial: many confuse regular cabbage (kroyt in Yiddish, Kraut in German) with savoy cabbage. In German, Kohl refers specifically to savoy cabbage—also called Wirsing in Vienna—not green, white, or any other variety. (Though, to be precise, other varieties like kale also fall under the Kohl umbrella in German, specifically as Schwarzkohl or “black cabbage.”) That distinction matters. The wordplay extends further: meVaser hints at met wasser, which closely resembles the Yiddish and German for “with water”—thus denoting a soup, not the familiar stuffed preparations. This homophonic pun created what we Jews call a minhag, a custom that emerged from the intersection of sacred language and practical necessity.

The result was a custom of eating savoy cabbage soup on Hoshanah Rabbah—not the labor-intensive stuffed cabbage rolls that everyone knows, but the soup derived from the elemental phrase: Savoy cabbage plus water. This minhag focused on the core ingredients that made the pun work. While the base was naturally vegan, for the holiday most families would have added whatever meat, bones, or rich schmaltz they could afford to imbue the soup with substance and flavor befitting the occasion.

The Archaeology of the Overlooked

In Gil Marks’s encyclopedic Encyclopedia of Jewish Food, cabbage receives extensive documentation—multiple pages devoted to its journey from Greek krambe through Talmudic kruv to Yiddish kroyt. The Hebrew word kruv ($\text{כְּרוּב}$) entered during Talmudic times, borrowed from Greek, marking cabbage as part of the post-Biblical expansion of Jewish foodways. Significantly, cabbage doesn’t appear in Biblical texts—the Greeks introduced cultivation throughout the Mediterranean, inadvertently shaping what would become a cornerstone of Ashkenazi cuisine.

As the late food historian Gil Marks observed, “Cabbage was the odor of the shtetl.” By the Middle Ages, it had become a staple of the poor, especially in northern Europe, and one of the most used vegetables by Ashkenazi Jews. The Talmud grouped cabbage among healing foods, a designation that would prove prophetic given modern nutritional science. Marks chronicles cabbage’s role across Jewish communities with remarkable breadth: Venetian Jews preparing verza sofegae—savoy cabbage slowly simmered in olive oil with onion, garlic, and rosemary (“the longer it cooks, the better it is”); Tuscan Jews making similar dishes but including tomatoes; Ashkenazi communities from the Baltic to the Black Sea using cabbage for soups (shchi, kapusniak, kohlsuppe), stuffed into pierogi and piroshki, and of course for cabbage rolls called gefulte kroit, prakas, or holishkes in Yiddish. But the specific tradition of savoy cabbage soup on Hoshanah Rabbah—the linguistic connection between “kol meVaser” and “Kohl mit Wasser”—appears only in passing references and, significantly, in the documented custom of the Yalkut Minhagim. This scarcity in documentation is itself telling: the tradition was so simple, so poverty-driven, that it was nearly erased from the culinary record.

The Botany of Distinction

Savoy cabbage (Brassica oleracea var. sabauda) deserves its specificity in this tradition. As noted above, the choice of savoy cabbage was linguistically anchored: in High German, Kohl referred only to this variety. Using the wrong cabbage would have broken the pun and the tradition. Unlike regular green cabbage, savoy has crinkly, ruffled leaves and a much sweeter, milder taste. This particular variety, with its Italian heritage, acts as an unconscious edible signifier of the Jewish journey, linking the Mediterranean sophistication of Venetian and Tuscan Jews with the rustic, necessary poverty of the Ashkenazi kitchen. Crucially for soup-making, it holds its texture when cooked without becoming mushy—ideal for preparations where you want the cabbage to melt into the broth while retaining character. Its delicate leaves become tender without disintegrating, making it superior to other cabbage varieties for the kind of rustic, Italian-style soups that Venetian and Tuscan Jews perfected.

The Aesthetic of the Herald: Layers of Meaning

The visual distinction matters too. Savoy cabbage’s unique, deeply crinkled, ruffled leaves create a different aesthetic experience—one that likely held deeper symbolic resonance than the smooth simplicity of other cabbages. This visual quality perhaps better embodied the “voice of the herald” (Kol meVaser) for communities that found meaning in the intersection of sound, appearance, and taste.

This connection works on two symbolic levels: the Royal Robe and the Unfurling Message:

The Royal Robe of the Herald

Unlike the pale, dense simplicity of a common cabbage (Kraut), the savoy’s texture and color suggest richness and gravity. The deep emerald green and highly ruffled surface evoke the image of a solemn, ceremonial garment or banner. This aesthetic elevates the food beyond its “poor man’s soup” status, lending the dish the appropriate visual gravitas for a moment of Messianic announcement. The humble vegetable is perceived as wearing a cloak fit for a herald announcing a world-changing event.

The Unfurling Message

The savoy’s crinkled texture, with its distinct ridges and layers, visually suggests a message or decree being unfurled, much like a scroll. In Jewish tradition, the message of redemption is a hidden, sacred truth revealed at a specific, sudden moment (Benjamin’s Jetztzeit). By consuming the cabbage, the cook and the eater are symbolically unwrapping and consuming the layered message, visually embodying the fervent liturgical yearning for the “voice” of the prophet to be heard and the final scroll of destiny to be opened. This physical act reinforces the profound linguistic pun, making the Savoy cabbage a perfect vehicle for the final, desperate plea of Hoshana Rabbah.

Multiple Meanings, Multiple Losses

The Hebrew connections multiply upon examination. The Hebrew name for cabbage, keruv ($\text{כְּרוּב}$), shares the same letters as baruch ($\text{בָּרוּךְ}$), meaning “blessed”—a coincidence that surely didn’t escape communities already inclined toward wordplay. Even more resonant: the Hebrew word for cherub ($\text{כְּרוּב}$) is spelled and pronounced exactly like the word for cabbage. In Jewish mystical tradition, the cherubim ($\text{כְּרוּבִים}$) represented divine guardians of sacred space. Since cherubim stood over the Ark of the Covenant holding the tablets and Torah, eating cabbage recalled those sacred guardians. This act subtly linked the poor person’s meager meal to the very architecture of redemption, suggesting that the most humble food could convey a divine message.

These layered meanings suggest a tradition rich in symbolic resonance, one that operated simultaneously on linguistic, theological, and practical levels.

The profound theological weight placed upon Hoshanah Rabbah is not merely a custom, but is anchored in classical rabbinic sources that frame the day as the conclusion of the entire judgment cycle. The Prophet Isaiah says, “They seek Me day [after] day” (Yeshayahu יְשַׁעְיָהוּ 58:2), and the Talmud (Jerusalem Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 4:8) interprets these “two days” as referring to the day the shofar, the Jewish ceremonial ram’s horn, is sounded (Rosh Hashanah) and the day we take the willow (Hoshanah Rabbah). This places the entire High Holiday period on a continuum, underscoring that while the judgment is opened with the shofar blast, it is not truly concluded until the final desperate prayers and rites of the last day of Sukkot. This framework explains why the humble act of eating Kohl mit Wasser became an edible final plea, linking the simple cabbage and water to the ultimate decree for the new year.

Crucially, the theological weight of this day amplified the desire for a symbolic custom. The mystical text, the Zohar, teaches that while the individual judgment for the new year is sealed on Yom Kippur, it is not delivered—not irrevocably set into motion—until the end of Sukkot (i.e., Hoshanah Rabbah). This final, desperate window provides one last chance to alter one’s verdict and decree for the new year, imbuing the day with the tension of an eleventh-hour appeal. The focus of this final judgment, according to the Mishnah, is the decree for rain in the coming year, underscoring the vital, life-and-death stakes of water on this specific holiday. Thus, the custom of eating Kohl mit Wasser—cabbage with water—became an additional, practical plea, a kind of edible prayer for a blessed and fruitful year.

Yet for all this apparent significance and even documented practice, the specific custom of savoy cabbage soup on Hoshanah Rabbah remains largely undocumented in surviving general sources. The systematic murder of German-speaking Ashkenazi Jewry didn’t just eliminate people—it obliterated the cultural contexts that made such traditions meaningful. The uncomfortable truth is that while the custom survives in contemporary Orthodox life, the tradition was so severely disrupted and marginalized that its current revival and written documentation (like that in the Yalkut Minhagim or my own recipe development) is an act of preservation against cultural silence, rather than a simple recollection.

The Viennese Context and Contemporary Redemption

My own approach reflects a specifically Viennese Jewish perspective—an Austro-Hungarian blend incorporating sweet, smoked, and hot paprika from a venerated Austrian brand, Italian polpa di pomodoro (acknowledging strong Italian influence in Viennese cuisine and culture), and reminding us that the savoy cabbage itself is intrinsically linked to its Italian heritage (Brassica oleracea var. sabauda). Contemporary additions like red miso substituting for meat and bones complete the picture. This creates what I consider a vegan interpretation of the classic Hungarian Savoy Cabbage Soup (Frankfurti leves, literally “Frankfurter soup”).

The ingredient list reads like a map of cultural intersections: dried porcini, carrots, leek, celery, sweated onions, loads of garlic, red miso, nutritional yeast, tomatoes, caraway seeds, Hungarian paprika varieties, marjoram, parsley, bay leaves, white cannellini beans, finishing olive oil. Served with grilled vegan sausage slices—it’s the kind of adaptation that would be completely incomprehensible to 19th-century practitioners yet somehow feels true to the tradition’s adaptive spirit.

My vegan adaptation transforms the “voice of the herald” into something different from what earlier generations might have hoped for. Instead of proclaiming the Messiah’s arrival, it speaks of smaller redemptions: eating without causing unnecessary suffering, finding nourishment in simple ingredients, connecting—however tenuously—with practices that might otherwise disappear entirely. This naturally vegan preparation (savoy cabbage plus water) becomes a meditation on ethical consumption and the Messianic promise itself. Classical Jewish sources suggest the Messianic era (Olam Haba, the World to Come) will be a time of universal peace, when all creatures live in harmony. This idea, based on the vision of the prophet Yeshayahu (יְשַׁעְיָהוּ) in Chapter 11, Verse 6 (וְגָר זְאֵב עִם־כֶּבֶשׂ: “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb”), leads many interpreters to view the World to Come as a fundamentally vegan or vegetarian age. The red miso provides the depth that bones once offered; dried porcini contribute earthiness and umami; cannellini beans add protein and substance. The result transforms what might have been thin soup into something that could anchor a holiday meal while respecting all living creatures.

The Sound of Digestion: A Demotic Piety

There is a vital, somatic element—a phenomenon rooted in physical, bodily experience—to this tradition that warrants academic acknowledgement, however irreverent and fundamentally improper it might appear on the surface. At the Hoshanah Rabbah table, we occasionally observe a playful semiotic inversion, a curious flip in meaning, primarily orchestrated by the children, where the solemn sacred sound of the liturgy becomes a decidedly mundane one. In a typically Jewish fashion, where wordplay and punning are favored over actual acts, the children express this inversion verbally (and often with much giggling), perceiving the inevitable digestive sounds of cabbage and bean consumption as literally producing a low, gaseous “kol meVaser.” This sound, which flirts with the scandalous precisely because it involves bodily function and sacred text, heralds a momentary, domestic disturbance. The white cannellini beans added to my contemporary reconstruction certainly amplify this physiological echo.

Far from mere humor, this speaks to a tradition deeply comfortable with bodily realities (a recurring theme in Jewish legal and folk culture) and a refusal to separate the sacred practice of the liturgy from biological necessity. It is a profoundly democratizing moment, linking the solemn anticipation of divine judgment and Messianic arrival with the common, mundane workings of the human digestive process—a core theological concept that finds holiness in the most ordinary and earthbound aspects of human existence.

The Herald’s Persistent Voice

What strikes me most is how thoroughly this tradition has been eclipsed by more photogenic preparations. Everyone knows stuffed cabbage—those neat packages swimming in sweet-and-sour sauce that appear on contemporary Jewish tables. They tell comfortable stories about care and technique, about mothers who had time to roll individual portions with love. “Kol meVaser” savoy cabbage soup tells a different story: one of communities that found the sacred in whatever happened to be available, who created meaning from necessity, who heard divine messages in the sounds their bodies made when finally nourished. This somatic reality is a recurring theme in Ashkenazi cuisine; cholent, the famous Sabbath stew, is the source of more than one joke due to the same inevitable digestive consequences of its own mix of beans, grains, and legumes. It’s less comfortable, more honest about the realities of Jewish life in pre-war Central Europe.

As I prepare this soup in my Vienna kitchen, I’m struck by the continuities and ruptures that define contemporary Jewish food culture. We’ve become curators of our own culinary history, elevating dishes that fit current aesthetic preferences while allowing others to slip quietly into obscurity. We want our Jewish food to be substantial, comforting, and Instagram-able.

But perhaps there’s value in preserving traditions that resist easy commodification, that remain stubbornly humble, that connect us to aspects of Jewish life we might prefer to forget. The linguistic pun that inspired this soup—the mishearing that found spiritual significance in coincidental sounds—represents a kind of folk creativity that sophisticated food culture tends to dismiss.

The essence of the Messianic, as the philosopher Walter Benjamin conceived it, is not endless progress but the revolutionary Jetztzeit—the “now-time”—where memory explodes into action, halting the catastrophic flow of history. The voice of the herald doesn’t signal a predictable future; it signals a sudden, redemptive stop.

The “blast” of redemption, as Walter Benjamin conceived it—a sudden, revolutionary stop—finds an immediate, profound echo in our liturgical world. While the shofar is generally silent after Yom Kippur, many communities (particularly Chassidic ones) follow a minhag to blow the shofar after each of the seven hakafot (circuits) on Hoshanah Rabbah. The concept of an intervention that blasts open the continuum of history is thus aurally tied to this actual, explosive sound on the day itself: the shofar’s t’ruah. Just as this ritual blast shatters the routine to announce divine sovereignty and judgment, so too does the “voice of the herald” (Kol meVaser) promise a sudden, complete rupture with historical suffering. In consuming the humble Kohl mit Wasser, the poor man’s edible pun, we are not just waiting for a whisper of redemption, but preparing our very bodies for the explosive arrival of the Messianic age, heralded by an unmistakable sound.

In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin described the Messiah’s arrival not as a subtle event, but as a force that “blasts open the continuum of history.” Whether this soup perfectly resembles the documented tradition in the Yalkut Minhagim may be less important than whether it serves this Benjaminian purpose today: to stop the clock of comfortable forgetting, to allow a hidden memory to blast its way into the present. The herald’s voice doesn’t need perfect historical accuracy to carry meaning. Sometimes the most authentic tradition is the willingness to keep listening for messages in whatever sounds happen to reach our ears.

The voice of the herald still calls, even from my contemporary Vienna kitchen, announcing not the end of days but the possibility of better days. As the traditional prayer concludes the Hoshanah Rabbah liturgy:

Kol meVasser, meVasser ve-Omer: Ba yeshuatcha gibor! Ba dodi! Kol meVasser. “The voice of the herald brings good tidings and proclaims: Your mighty salvation comes! My Beloved is coming!—the voice heralds.”

In the gentle bubbling of savoy cabbage slowly surrendering to heat, in the steam that carries the earthy scent of vegetables becoming nourishment, perhaps we can still hear that ancient promise: everything, somehow, will be good.

RECIPE: “Kol meVasser” Savoy Cabbage Soup for Hoshanah Rabbah

This is not just cabbage soup—it is specifically savoy cabbage soup, because only with savoy does the pun work in German.

This recipe is my reconstruction of the Kol meVaser savoy cabbage soup. Traditionally, it was nothing more than savoy cabbage simmered in water—a humble weekday dish elevated by the pun and the holiday setting. My version keeps the Yom Tov spirit alive by enriching the base in a vegan way, adding the depth of dried porcini and the umami of red miso in place of the “meat and bones” that would once have marked the festival table.

Serves 10-12

Ingredients

Aromatics & Base:

• 0.88 oz (25g) dried porcini mushrooms, rehydrated, chopped
• 2 large onions, diced
• 2 medium carrots, diced
• 1 large leek, white and light green parts only, cleaned and sliced
• 3 celery stalks, diced
• 1 head of garlic, minced

Spices & Seasonings:

• 2 teaspoons caraway seeds
• 2 teaspoons sweet Hungarian paprika
• 1 teaspoon hot Hungarian paprika
• 1 teaspoon smoked Hungarian paprika
• 2 teaspoons dried marjoram
• 2 bay leaves
• No salt (as we use miso for its umami)
• freshly ground black pepper to taste

Main Ingredients:

• 1 can (14 oz/400g) chopped tomato pulp (polpa)
• 5 tablespoons red miso paste (the darker color and deep fermentation best mimics long-simmered bone flavor; in a pinch, use white miso)
• 2 tablespoons nutritional yeast
• 4.5 oz (128g) dry cannellini or regular dried white beans, soaked over night, drained and rinsed
• 1 large head savoy cabbage (about 2 lbs/900g), cored and chopped
• 1/4 cup fresh parsley, chopped
• apple cider vinegar to taste

For Serving:

• vegan sausages, grilled and sliced (optional)
• extra virgin olive oil for drizzling
• fresh parsley for garnish

Method

1. Soak beans
   • Rinse and soak the dried beans overnight.
2. Prepare the Porcini
   • Soak dried porcini in 2 cups hot water for 15 minutes
   • Strain, reserving soaking liquid
   • Chop rehydrated mushrooms
3. Build the Base
   • We don’t use oil to sauté the onions, but you could optionally heat olive oil in a large soup pot over medium heat for that purpose
   • Add onions, cook until translucent (5-6 minutes)
   • Add carrots, leek, and celery; sweat for 5 minutes
   • Add minced garlic and caraway seeds; cook 1 minute until fragrant
4. Bloom the spices:
   • In a dry pan, slightly toast the sweet paprika, hot paprika, smoked paprika, and dried marjoram.
   • Add the bloomed spices to the base
5. Add Mushrooms, Tomatoes and Miso
   • Stir in chopped porcini mushrooms
   • Add tomato pulp
   • Whisk miso paste with water until pourable
   • Add miso mixture to the pot
6. Add Vegetables and Liquids
   • Add chopped Savoy cabbage, and drained beans
   • Add porcini soaking liquid and enough fresh water to cover by an inch.
   • Add bay leaves
   • Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer gently for 1 hour, or until the beans are completely tender.
7. Before Serving
   • Add the nutritional yeast.
   • Stir in fresh parsley
   • Season with freshly ground black pepper to taste
   • Remove bay leaves
   • Adjust seasoning with a couple of teaspoons of apple cider vinegar for tang
8. Serving
   • Ladle into bowls
   • Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil
   • Top with grilled vegan sausage slices if using
   • Garnish with fresh parsley
   • Serve with slice of round challah

Notes

• Make Ahead: Soup improves overnight. Reheat gently, adding water if needed
• Storage: Keeps 3-4 days refrigerated, freezes well for 3 months
• Vegan Sausage: Grill separately to maintain texture, add just before serving
• Miso: Red miso adds depth; substitute with white miso or salt and additional nutritional yeast if unavailable
• Variation: Add 2 medium potatoes (such as Yukon Gold or waxy), peeled and diced, when adding the savoy cabbage
• Minimalist version: 1 medium head of Savoy cabbage + water to cover + miso. Simmer until tender. Serve hot with rye bread.

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