Pisni Holubtsi z Rysom ta Hrybamy (пісні голубці з рисом та грибами, Lenten cabbage rolls)

The best thing in these meatless holubtsi is the water you almost threw away. Dried mushrooms give you their first gift in the bowl: dark, forest-smelling liquor, almost black tea, and that is what turns rice and cabbage into a fasting dish with shoulders. No meat, no butter, no pretending. The pot feeds itself.

Pisni means Lenten, fasting, and these belong especially to Sviata Vecheria, the Christmas Eve table, though I make them whenever winter has got into the walls. The filling is simple: rice, mushrooms, onion, carrot, dill, black pepper. What matters is that the rice is only half-cooked before rolling, so it can finish inside the leaf, drinking the mushroom liquor and tomato until each roll swells tight but stays tender.

Save the zasmazhka, the slow-sweated onion and carrot, for the sauce near the end. If you cook all that sweetness from the start, it flattens into the pot. Add it later and it sits brightly on the broth, orange and alive, the way Aunt Nadia wrote in one letter: "until the smell changes, then you know." She never said how many minutes. Of course she didn't.

Make a big pot. Holubtsi improve overnight, and the quiet ones at the bottom, the slightly collapsed ones, are usually the best.