Borscht

• 1. Introduction

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  Borscht is a sour soup from Eastern Europe, and in March 1961 its recipe was read out from space. The Soviet craft Korabl-Sputnik 4 was circling the Earth in low orbit, carrying animals and a mannequin as a rehearsal for crewed flights. During a communications equipment test, it broadcast a pre-recorded borscht recipe back to the ground.

  The choice says something about how deeply this dish is rooted. Borscht is not one recipe. The name covers soups that are red, green, pink or a dark brownish-gray. Some are served hot and others chilled. Some are thick enough to hold a spoon upright, and some are sipped from a cup. Some contain no beetroot at all.

  So what did the very first borscht contain? How did a sour soup of wild plants grow into a symbol that whole nations feel is theirs? How do cooks make a soup sour on purpose, and why does the sourness matter so much? And why would an international cultural body one day feel the need to say that no country owns it?

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• 2. Hogweed Beginnings

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  Every May, Slavic foragers went to damp meadows to gather common hogweed, a tall plant known to botanists as Heracleum sphondylium. They stewed its roots with meat. The stems, leaves and flower clusters, called umbels, were treated differently. Cooks chopped them, covered them with water and left them somewhere warm. After a few days, lactic and alcoholic fermentation produced a mixture described as something between beer and sauerkraut.

  That sour ferment gave the soup its name. The Proto-Slavic word for hogweed is the ancestor of borshch in Ukrainian and Russian, barszcz in Polish and the English borscht. English borrowed it through Yiddish, because Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe first popularized the dish in North America. Linguists trace the root back further still, to a Proto-Indo-European word meaning point or stubble.

  The finished soup was fierce. Its sourness made the mouth pucker and its smell was pungent. Yet in 1830 the Polish ethnographer Łukasz Gołębiowski wrote that "Poles have been always partial to tart dishes, which are somewhat peculiar to their homeland and vital to their health."

  Hogweed itself was no local oddity. It grows across the north temperate zone, and people ate it from Eastern Europe to Siberia and even northwestern North America. In the 17th century, the Polish botanist Simon Syrenius, also written Szymon Syreński, called "our Polish hogweed" a vegetable well known in Poland, Ruthenia, Lithuania and Samogitia. He said it went into a "tasty and graceful soup" with capon stock, eggs, sour cream and millet. His real interest was medicine, and he recommended pickled hogweed juice as a cure for fever or a hangover.

  Written traces of the soup are thin and a little teasing. On the 17th of October 1584, the German merchant Martin Gruneweg reached the river Borshchahivka near Kyiv. He recorded a local legend that the river was named for a borscht market, then doubted it. In his view, Ruthenians rarely if ever bought borscht, since every household cooked its own as a staple food and drink. A 16th-century Russian household guide, the Domostroy, gives a springtime instruction. Grow hogweed "by the fence, around the whole garden, where the nettle grows," and "for the Lord's sake, share it with those in need."

  Hogweed borscht was mostly a poor man's food, and Polish speech still remembers it. "Cheap like borscht" means dirt cheap, an idiom also found in Yiddish and Canadian English. Putting "two mushrooms into borscht" means going overboard. In the 17th century, the monastic professors of the University of Kraków ate hogweed borscht regularly as a fasting dish, from Lent until Rogation days. It was uncommon on royal tables. One exception comes from the botanist Marcin of Urzędów, who cited the court physician Giovanni Manardo to report that the Polish-born King Vladislaus II had a hogweed dish prepared for him at his court in Buda.

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• 3. Beets Take Over

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  By the 19th century in rural Poland, the word barszcz stretched to cover soups soured with barberries, currants, gooseberries, cranberries, celery or plums. Other ingredients had eventually replaced hogweed altogether, and a tart taste was the only requirement left. One older source of tartness was kissel, a soured, gelatinous mixture of water with barley flour, oatmeal or rye flour. The 12th-century chronicle of Kievan Rus', The Tale of Bygone Years, already mentions it. It stayed a staple of Ukrainian and Russian cooking until the middle of the 19th century. In Poland, a soup of diluted kissel became known as żur or barszcz, and later, to tell it apart from the red kind, as barszcz biały, white borscht.

  The first Polish borscht recipes on paper come from chefs who cooked for magnates, the Polish aristocrats, in the late 17th century. Stanisław Czerniecki, head chef to Prince Aleksander Michał Lubomirski, published several in 1682 in Compendium ferculorum. It was the first cookbook issued originally in Polish. His sour soups included a lemon borscht and a "royal borscht" of dried, smoked or fresh fish with fermented rye bran. A manuscript from the Radziwiłł family court, dated to about 1686, goes further. It describes a hogweed borscht mixed with poppy seeds or ground almonds, made for Lent. In the trompe-l'oeil style of Baroque cooking, cooks dyed chopped pike partly with saffron and shaped it into mock eggs.

  In the 18th century, borscht made from fermented beetroot appeared on tables, and it won the most favor. King Stanisław August Poniatowski served it at his famous Thursday dinners, and the Czartoryski princes put it out at Easter breakfast. Respect came slowly, though. In the 18th century a "borscht man" meant someone clumsy and awkward. The 19th-century historian Cezary Biernacki later wrote that "Borscht was and is the most commonplace, and with the addition of spices, the most accurate, truly Polish soup, received with great taste, indeed, and respect."

  Farther east, the soup branched in other directions. A Russian cookbook of 1905 includes onion borscht, and sorrel-based green borscht remains a summer favorite in Ukraine and Russia. Elena Molokhovets published A Gift to Young Housewives in 1861, the best-selling Russian cookbook of the 19th century, with nine borscht recipes. Some used kvass, the Slavic fermented drink made from rye bread. Before beets dominated, cabbage borscht, made with fresh cabbage or sauerkraut, was especially important and could be indistinguishable from the Russian soup shchi. A Ukrainian proverb says, "without bread, it's no lunch; without cabbage, it's no borscht."

  The beet itself arrived late to the bowl. Beta vulgaris is native to the Mediterranean Basin and was grown in antiquity, but only for its leaves, because the root was tough, whitish and bitter. Round, red, sweet beetroots were not reliably reported until the 12th century. They did not reach Eastern Europe before the 16th. Beet greens probably flavored green borscht long before any red version existed. In 1568 the Polish poet Mikołaj Rej printed the earliest known Polish recipe for pickled beetroots in his book Life of an Honest Man. He also praised the leftover brine as very tasty, an early form of beet sour. Folk medicine used that brine against hangovers and, mixed with honey, against sore throats.

  Nobody knows who first used beet sour to flavor borscht and turn it red. The written clues begin with the Russian ethnographer Andrey Meyer, who noted in 1781 that people in Ukraine fermented red beets for cooking borscht. A description of the Kharkiv Governorate from 1785 called borscht the most consumed food there. It was cooked from beets and cabbage with herbs and millet on sour kvass, always with pork or beef lard. In 1806, Jerzy Samuel Bandtkie's Polish-German dictionary became the first to define barszcz as a tart soup of pickled beetroots.

  Two 19th-century cookbooks give a geographic hint. Yekaterina Avdeyeva's Handbook of the Experienced Russian Housewife of 1842 and Wincenta Zawadzka's The Lithuanian Cook of 1854 both call beet borscht "Little Russian borscht." That was the period term for ethnic Ukrainians under imperial Russian rule. The label points to what is now Ukraine, whose soils and climate suit beets. Ukrainian legends, probably from the 19th century, credit Cossacks instead. In one tale, Zaporozhian Cossacks serving in the Polish army invented it on the way to break the siege of Vienna in 1683. In another, Don Cossacks serving Russia did so while besieging Azov in 1695.

  Potatoes and tomatoes came last. Spanish conquistadors brought both from the Americas in the 16th century, but Eastern Europe did not grow and eat them widely until the 19th. Potatoes then replaced turnips in borscht. Tomatoes, whether fresh, canned or as paste, took over the job of souring from beet sour. In Ukraine the two methods coexisted for a while, until tomatoes won out during the last third of the 19th century.

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• 4. The Pot and the Sour

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  Inside a Russian oven, the traditional masonry stove used for both cooking and heating, ingredients finished at different speeds. Cooks had to plan for that, and the plan became the signature method of borscht. The vegetables are precooked separately from the meat, by sautéing, braising, boiling or baking, and only then joined with the stock. The method mattered enough that Russian has a separate word for the shortcut, borshchok, a diminutive for the version where every vegetable goes raw into the stock.

  The stock comes first. Cooks boil meat, bones or both, most often beef, pork or a mix. Brisket, ribs, shank and chuck are thought to give the most flavor, and marrow bones are best for a bone stock. Meat stock takes about two hours and bone stock four to six. The meat comes out and returns to the pot only 10-15 minutes before the borscht is ready. Smoked meats give a smoky soup, and some cooks use poultry or mutton. Fasting versions use fish stock, and vegetarian ones often use a broth of forest mushrooms.

  The vegetables are beetroots, white cabbage, carrots, parsley root, potatoes, onions and tomatoes. Some recipes add beans, tart apples, turnip, swede, celeriac, zucchini or bell peppers. Roots such as onions and carrots are sautéed, traditionally in lard or butter, then mixed with tomatoes or tomato paste. Dry beans are boiled on their own. Potatoes and cabbage simmer in the stock for about 15 minutes before the precooked vegetables join them. Salt, black pepper, garlic, bay leaves and dill are the usual seasonings, though some cooks reach for saffron, horseradish, ginger or prunes. A common opinion holds that a good borscht should be thick enough for a spoon to stand upright in it.

  The defining tastes are sweet and sour, and traditionally the sour is made at home. Cooks cover sliced beetroots with lukewarm water that has been boiled first. Bacteria then ferment some of the sugars in the beets into dextran, mannitol, acetic acid and lactic acid. Dextran gives the liquid a slightly viscous feel. Stale rye bread is often added to speed things along. After about 2-5 days with bread, or 2-3 weeks without it, the deep red liquid is strained and ready. It goes in shortly before the soup is done, because long boiling would drive off the tartness.

  Jewish recipes usually leave out the bread. Chametz, or leavened bread, would make the sour unfit for Passover meals. Slavic languages call the sour kvas, and Yiddish calls it rosl, from an old Slavic word for any brine made by steeping salted meat or vegetables in water. Cooks also add it to prepared horseradish or use it in a pot roast marinade.

  Waiting days for a ferment suits few weeknights, so many recipes swap in fresh beetroot juice and take the sour from elsewhere. Options include vinegar, tomato products, lemon juice, citric acid, dry red wine, dill pickle juice and sauerkraut juice. Some cooks use tart apples, Mirabelle plums, apricots or a fermented mixture of rye flour and water.

  The bowl itself is rarely eaten alone. Smetana, a soured dairy product similar to French crème fraîche, is the usual topping, and dill is the usual herb. Many bowls sit over halved hard-boiled eggs. As with any East Slavic soup, borscht comes with a side dish, and at the very least a slice of bread. In Ukraine that is often pampushky, puffy yeast rolls glazed with oil and crushed garlic. In Russia, cooks may offer vatrushki, which are round baked cheese tarts, or syrniki, small cheese pancakes. A third choice is krupeniki, casseroles of buckwheat baked with cheese, all built on the farmer cheese called tvorog.

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• 5. A Soup of Many Places

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  In Ukraine, virtually every oblast has its own borscht. The typical recipe calls for beef and pork, but the Kyiv version also uses mutton or lamb. In the Poltava region the stock is made from chicken, duck or goose, and the soup comes with halushky, thick noodles of wheat or buckwheat flour. Chernihiv borscht features zucchini, beans and apples. Its beets are sautéed in vegetable oil instead of lard, and only tomatoes and tart apples supply the sourness. Lviv borscht rests on bone stock and arrives with chunks of Vienna sausage. In Southern Ukraine, legumes are typical. Historically, borscht with meat was a holiday dish, while the Lenten versions used fish such as dried crucian carp.

  Poland has the thick soups described above, and also a ruby-colored beet bouillon called barszcz czysty czerwony, clear red borscht. Cooks blend strained meat-and-vegetable stock with wild mushroom broth and beet sour. Some use smoked meat in the stock, and add lemon juice, dill pickle brine or dry red wine for extra bite. At dinner parties it may be served as a hot drink in a twin-handled cup, with a croquette or a filled pastry alongside. A Polish croquette is a crêpe wrapped around a filling, breadcrumbed and fried again. Unlike other borscht, this one is never whitened with sour cream. The thick, many-vegetable kind is still called "Ukrainian borscht" in Poland.

  Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe took beetroot borscht from their Slavic neighbors and reshaped it to fit kosher law. Because the law forbids combining meat with milk, two versions developed. The meat one, fleischik, uses beef brisket and cabbage, never pork. The dairy one, milchik, is vegetarian and blended with sour cream or with a mixture of milk and egg yolks. Both are sweetened with beet sugar, and Galician Jews liked theirs especially sweet. A hot boiled potato typically sits on the side. In prewar Eastern Europe, cooks set the sour to ferment around Purim so it would be ready four weeks later for Passover.

  Russian regional versions are just as specific. Siberian borscht is known for its meatballs. Pskov borscht uses dried smelt from the local lakes. Monastic Lenten borscht replaces cabbage with marinated kelp. The Russian Navy version, flotsky borshch, is defined by vegetables cut into squares or diamonds instead of thin strips. In the Kuban region, cooks use a local beet cultivar called borschevaya 43, whose paler color turns the soup golden or orange.

  In summer, Lithuania prefers its borscht cold. Beet sour or beet juice is blended with sour cream, buttermilk, soured milk, kefir or yogurt, giving a pink or magenta color. It is served refrigerated over chopped beetroot, cucumbers, radishes and green onion, with halves of hard-boiled egg and fresh dill. The dish grew from the shared cooking of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It began as everyday peasant food in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and eventually reached noble tables. The physician Johann Peter Frank was served the icy soup in Nyasvizh in 1805 and described it as already established. The first known recipe, called chłodnik, was recorded in Warsaw at the end of the 18th century by Paul Tremo, chef to the Commonwealth's last ruler. The poet Adam Mickiewicz mentioned it in his 1834 epic Pan Tadeusz. Since 2023, Vilnius has held an annual Pink Soup Fest in its honor.

  Some soups share the name without sharing the beets. The one common trait is a tart taste. Polish white borscht, also called żur or żurek, is made from fermented rye flour or oatmeal, flavored with garlic and marjoram, and poured over eggs and fresh boiled sausage. In the Carpathian Mountains of southern Poland, whey or buttermilk supplies the tartness. Gray borscht, barszcz szary, is a regional name for czernina, a blood soup. It mixes poultry blood with vinegar and turns dark brownish-gray. Green borscht is made from sorrel, and cooks add spinach, chard, nettle or garden orache once the sorrel season passes.

  Farther south and east, the name travels again. In Romanian and Moldovan cooking, fermented wheat bran or cornmeal in water is called borș. It sours a family of soups known as borș or ciorbă, including ciorbă de burtă, made with tripe. Armenian, Azerbaijani and Georgian cooks make a hot beef soup with green peppers, red chili and fresh cilantro. In northeast China, the Harbin soup Luosong tang, "Russian soup," is built on red cabbage and tomatoes. It is also called Chinese borscht and has spread as far as Hong Kong. In Shanghai's Haipai cuisine, tomatoes lead and flour thickens the soup instead of sour cream.

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• 6. Fasts, Feasts and Funerals

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  At a post-funeral wake in East Slavic countries, memorial borscht is served as the first course. According to a traditional belief, the soul of the departed either feeds on the steam rising from the hot dishes or is carried up to heaven by it. Blini, porridge, boiled potatoes and fresh bread share the table. In the region of Polesye, which straddles the Belarusian-Ukrainian border, the same steaming dishes are offered to ancestors' souls during the semi-pagan remembrance ceremony called Dzyady, or Forefathers' Night.

  In parts of Ukraine, the third day of a wedding celebration is called do nevistky na borshch, which means "visit daughter-in-law to eat borscht." Ukrainians treat the soup as a symbol of hospitality and serve it at many traditional celebrations.

  On Christmas Eve in Poland and Ukraine, borscht opens a meal that is festive and fasting at once. It begins after the first star appears, on the 24th of December for Roman Catholics or the 6th of January for Greek Catholics. Traditionally it has twelve dishes and no land-animal ingredients. So the borscht is vegetarian or built on fish stock, and it is not whitened with sour cream. Ukrainian cooks sauté the vegetables in vegetable oil, add beans and mushrooms, and may thicken the soup with wheat flour dry-roasted in a pan. The Polish version, barszcz wigilijny, is a clear ruby broth, and its fish stock is made from heads cut off the fish used in other dishes. The mushrooms from the broth are saved to fill uszka, small dumplings that go into the bowl. Red borscht with dumplings began to appear on Polish Christmas Eve tables in the 19th century.

  Lent has its own soup. The meatless fast before Easter is tied to white borscht, żur. On Holy Saturday, the last day of the fast, Polish youths once staged a mock funeral for it. They buried a pot of the soup in the ground or broke it, sometimes while an unsuspecting boy carried it on his head, to the crowd's amusement. The next day it returned to the Easter table in its richer form, with sausage, bacon and eggs.

  Among Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews, a vegetarian borscht called peysakhdiker borsht is considered essential at Passover, served with sour cream and boiled potatoes on the side. The holiday falls in spring, so cooks used the occasion to finish off leftover beet sour from the winter's pickled beets. They also used up the potatoes stored over winter and the sour cream that was plentiful in the new calving season. Cold borscht blended with sour cream is popular at Shavuot, a holiday customarily linked with dairy foods that falls in late May or early June. Seudah Shlishit, the third meal of the Sabbath, often includes borscht as well.

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• 7. From Paris to the Catskills

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  In 1819, the French chef Marie-Antoine Carême worked briefly for Emperor Alexander I and turned the Russian soup into a showpiece. For him, the original was only inspiration for a lavish dish with an air of eastern exoticism. Beyond vegetables and beet sour, his recipe calls for a roast chicken, a fried chicken, a duck, a piece of veal, an oxtail, a marrow bone, a pound of bacon and six large sausages. He suggests serving it with beef quenelles, deviled eggs and croûtons. Russian and Polish aristocrats regularly employed celebrated French chefs, who then presented such dishes back home as foreign curiosities.

  Carême's apprentice Auguste Escoffier was mostly fascinated by the soup's vivid ruby-red color. He simplified the master's recipe and secured a place for potage bortsch in French cuisine. Urbain Dubois and Émile Bernard, who had both worked at Polish aristocratic courts, presented it to French readers as a Polish soup. Their 1856 book La cuisine classique lists it as potage au jus de betteraves à la polonaise. By the third edition in 1868, the name had become potage barsch à la polonaise. In 1867, beetroot borscht appeared at a Russian-themed dinner at the International Exposition in Paris, along with herrings, sturgeon, coulibiac, Pozharsky cutlets and vinaigrette salad. The menu strengthened the soup's association with Russian culture abroad.

  Empire carried borscht in other directions. As the Russian Empire grew across most of northern and central Eurasia, the soup entered the cooking of peoples from Finland to the Caucasus and Iran, and on to Central Asia, China and Alaska, then Russian America. Westward it fared worse. Germans used to scoff at it along with other East European fare. The chefs who turned it into haute cuisine did more for its reputation in Western Europe.

  Mass migration did the rest across the Atlantic. Jews from the Pale of Settlement, an area along the western edge of the Russian Empire that included much of present-day Ukraine, brought the Ukrainian beetroot version with them. The earliest waves met a different soup, because cabbage borscht still dominated in parts of Russia. The Mennonites began arriving in Canada and the United States from Russia's Volga region in the 1870s, and they still avoid beetroots. Their versions include Komst Borscht, made with cabbage or sauerkraut, and Somma Borscht, a summer soup of sorrel. A Jewish reference work published in 1906 said that even American Jewish cooks then preferred cabbage-based kraut borscht. Later Jewish immigration made the red version popular in America.

  In the 1930s, most American hotels refused Jewish guests because of widespread anti-Semitism. New York Jews therefore flocked to Jewish-owned resorts in the Catskill Mountains for their summer vacations. Restaurants there offered all-you-can-eat Ashkenazi fare with plenty of borscht. Grossinger's, one of the largest resorts, served it throughout the day, every day of the year. The region became known, at first in derision, as the Borscht Belt. Because most visitors came in summer, the borscht was usually cold.

  Marc Gold was one of its largest suppliers and in his best years produced 1,750 short tons, about 1,590 tonnes, annually. His version is puréed beetroot seasoned with sugar, salt and citric acid, usually blended with sour cream and served as a refreshing drink. It is closer to a beet smoothie than to a soup. Nikolai Burlakoff, author of The World of Russian Borsch, says this "purplish, watery broth" is what America associates with borscht in general and with Jewish borscht in particular.

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• 8. Soviet Kitchens, Rival Claims

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  In 2008 the journalist James Meek called borscht the common denominator of the Soviet kitchen. It tied together "the high table of the Kremlin and the meanest canteen in the boondocks of the Urals." The Ukrainian-born leader Leonid Brezhnev was especially fond of it, and his wife kept cooking it for him personally even after they moved into the Kremlin.

  The borscht meant for space travel followed a strict method. Beef, beetroots, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, onions, parsley root and tomato paste were all cooked separately. They were then combined one at a time in a controlled order, sterilized, packed into tubes, sealed airtight and autoclaved. In the 1970s, the tubes gave way to packages of rehydratable freeze-dried borscht with regular-size pieces of cooked vegetables.

  Behind the canteens stood a deliberate policy. Government-sponsored cookbooks such as The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, curated by Anastas Mikoyan in 1939, promoted a unified Soviet cuisine. Their recipes were standardized and nutritionally "rational." Culinary vocational schools across the country taught the same techniques, creating a common style in cafés and restaurants. Many recipes drew on the cuisines of the country's ethnic groups but were presented as Soviet heritage, cut off from their geographic origins. As a result, many people inside and outside the Soviet Union came to see borscht as a Soviet or, by extension, Russian dish.

  The Russian food writer William Pokhlyobkin objected. He wrote that beet-based borscht belongs among the "dishes of Ukrainian cookery" that entered international cuisine. Foreigners calling it Russian could be forgiven, he said, but not Soviet authors and chefs who spread such ignorance. Most evidence points the same way. In its currently popular beet form, borscht most probably originated in what is now Ukraine, where the saying goes, "borscht and porridge are our food." The Russian equivalent puts shchi in borscht's place.

  Still, Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Lithuanians and Ashkenazi Jews all claim it as a national or ethnic dish. Such claims are not necessarily exclusive, since the soup's history is older than the modern nation states of Eastern Europe. Burlakoff calls borscht "a global phenomenon" and an almost perfect example of "glocalization," a highly local dish that spread and adapted to new conditions. The linguist and anthropologist Irina Perianova offers a sharper view. "People tend to be very proprietal about their food and proud of it," she says, and she describes culinary disputes as a battlefield for myths.

  In 2020, Ukraine began the process of having borscht recognized as part of its intangible cultural heritage, with support from chefs and food writers such as Marianna Dushar. In 2022, UNESCO added "Culture of Ukrainian borscht cooking" to its List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding, citing Russia's invasion of Ukraine. UNESCO also noted that borscht cooking is practiced in communities across the broader region and that the listing implies neither exclusivity nor ownership. The Smithsonian Institution's festival blog called the decision a landmark in a dispute over the soup's true country of origin that it still described as ongoing.

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