ON 25 FEBRUARY 2022, I woke up after a turbulent night checking news updates about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Amid the shock and bouts of crying and doom-scrolling, a seemingly trivial yet intimately unsettling thought entered my mind. I realised that after years of investigating national cuisines and identities for a book I was working on, I no longer knew how to think or talk about borsch, a beet soup that Ukraine and Russia claimed as their own.
I grew up in Soviet Moscow eating borsch – no “t” at the end, that’s a Yiddish addition – at least twice a week; after we emigrated in 1974, it signified for me the complicated, difficult home we had left. Here in New York, where I live, a big pot made by my mother usually sat in my fridge. But who did have the right to claim it as heritage? That tangled question of cultural ownership I’d been reflecting on for so long had landed on my table with an intensity that suddenly felt viscerally personal.
Back in Moscow, in the politically stagnant 1970s, I never regarded borsch as any people’s “national dish”. It was just there, a piece of our shared Soviet reality like the brown winter snow or the buses filled with hangover breath or my scratchy wool school uniform. Our socialist borsch came in different guises. Institutional borsch with its reek of stale cabbage was to be endured at kindergartens, hospitals and workers’ canteens across the 11 time zones of our vast Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Personal borsch, on the other hand, brought out every Soviet mother’s and grandmother’s sweet ingenuity – although to me it all tasted kind of the same in the end.
My mother was inordinately proud of her hot, super-quick vegetarian version. I still have an image of her in our Moscow kitchen, phone tucked under her chin, shredding the carrots, cabbage and beets on a clunky box grater into our chipped enamel family pot. It was her recipe, she always insisted, a miracle of shortage economy conjured from a can of tomato paste and some withered root veggies. In the autumn she’d add a tart Antonovka apple; in winter maybe a glob of American ketchup for a piquant, faintly dissident touch.
Ukraine became an independent state in Russia developed any modern form of national consciousness. The Slavic word most likely referred to hogweed back then, a common plant that was often fermented and used for a sour green potage. The deep-red soup must have developed towards the start of the 18th century as the cultivation of beetroot in eastern Europe took off. From then on, mentions of borsch in Russian cookbooks became fairly common, although often referencing (Little Russia) – the imperial term for Ukraine.
