The Hungarian name of this sauerkraut soup is korhelyleves whose literal English translation means drunkard’s soup. It’s eaten traditionally on New Year’s Day  as it’s considered to be an effective cure of hangover.  The soup’s sourish flavour can supposedly relieve the hangover’s unpleasant symptomes – in the absence of personal experience I can neither confirm nor deny it. But I think it’s even better than “hair of the dog”.

In my opinion cooking this tasty soup shouldn’t be restricted to this one day, it can be a perfect lunch at any time of year. The following recipe differs from the classic korhelyleves in so far as it includes root vegetables, mushrooms and rice, but doesn’t contain roux, it’s thickened with a flour – sour cream mixture.