The New Yorker:
During my childhood in Ukraine, my family had only one way of making borscht. Place oxtail in a heavy pot with cold water and aromatics. Simmer for hours until the meat is tender and the stock rich and viscous. Add the skimmed fat to a frying pan to soften the smazhennia, a Ukrainian sofrito of diced onions and finely julienned carrots, until the natural sugars are drawn out. Then comes the acidity: juicy tomatoes in the summer; fizzy, funky fermented tomato purée in the winter; and, always, some julienned beetroot—not too much, and only the light-colored borshevoy buriak, which grow in the sandy soils of southern Ukraine. (“How can one use this ghastly red beetroot—it dies the potatoes red, everything red!” my late grandmother Lusia would say with deadly seriousness.) Boil large chunks of potato and red kidney beans in the broth until soft, but cook shredded cabbage only briskly, to retain a slight crunch. Season with dense homemade sour cream, salt-cured pork pounded with garlic and salt, or, if you’re old-school, umami-rich powders made from pulverized sun-dried tomatoes and gobies, a bull-faced fish found in the Sea of Azov. The soup must be thick, so the spoon stands up straight. Garnish with handfuls of dill, fermented in winter. Rye sourdough or garlic pampushky bread, and often whole spring onions and hot red chilies in the summer, are to be bitten into between each spoonful.
It wasn’t until I reached adulthood that I realized that borscht could be made another way. I was just out of graduate school and working as an assistant Russian literary translator. My main work was on classics—Pushkin’s “The Captain’s Daughter,” Platonov’s “The Foundation Pit”—but my mentor also translated smaller articles on the side, and when he didn’t have enough time to take on new assignments he would send them my way. One day, an unusual one arrived in my in-box: a study, conducted by a Russian academic, on the history of borscht. I don’t remember all the details of the article, and my translation has been lost to time, but one description stayed with me: borscht in the early nineteenth century, made for the Russian tsar, consisted of three stocks blended together—one of veal, another of morel mushrooms, and a third of goose and dried prune, with sour cherries used for acidity instead of tomatoes, which were not yet common in Russian cooking. This sounded like the most luxurious foundation of a borscht I could imagine—both worlds apart from my family’s version and somehow similar, a balance of meaty and sour and sweet.
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