Borshch

My friend Bill, from Little Rock, loves to post recipes on his Face Book page, and his frequent mention (and pictures) of borshch triggered a whopping nostalgia in me as the weather turned cold and I remembered the days when I became an avid convert to things Russian when I was at the Army Language School back in the early 60s. In those days there was a sizable Russian immigrant community living in the Clement St. area in the Richmond District of San Francisco. They've all died off now and the place has come to be called the New Chinatown.

When I got out of the army and came to live in San Francisco in 1965, the Russian tea houses and the Znanie Bookstore were still there and I got to hear - not so much use - Russian on a regular basis. I didn't have a lot of money, but fortunately the borshch and piroshki lunches that I managed to have about once a week were within my price range, and to this day they remain a kind of comfort food for me. The Russians were the reason I sought out the Richmond district to live in, and I got my first apartment as a grown-up person now forever financially independent of my parents (or the U.S. Army) with army friend Jerry Rodgers on the corner of 14th and Anza, within walking distance of several Russian restaurants. 

I learned to make piroshki - the beef and boiled egg variety - and regularly had friends over for borshch and piroshki dinners. Imagine my surprise when I looked up recipes for both recently and realized how much work they were. In those early days in the 60s they were simply fun to make. Everything was a grand adventure, and I never associated making food with "work."

All that has changed. When I decided I'd make borshch yesterday I quickly decided I'd leave the piroshki for another time. I don't have the stamina I once did.  My idea of exercise these days is walking to my chair in front of the fire.

In the early days, I was pretty pro-Russian, culturally, if not politically, so I just assumed these were quintessentially Russian dishes. It took a lot of convincing for me to accept that the Ukrainians might have at least as much claim to the dish, or that the Poles and their pirogi got to the idea of these meat (or potatoes) filled donuts first.

But my superchef husband, Taku, who has a whole library of good Japanese cook books, and has acquired a good background on food lore, insists that borshch was originally Ukrainian and that I should follow a Ukrainian recipe if I were going to make it. I thought for a moment about just following a Russian recipe online (the video version, now that YouTube runs our lives) and telling him it was Ukrainian. But I knew I couldn't lie to him about anything so sacred as food, and went with a Ukrainian recipe in the end. When we sat down to dinner last night, I had the best borshch I've ever eaten. Of course, it could just be that it has been so long since I made it or ate it in a restaurant that I simply forgot how much I love the dish. I can't believe I've gone so long without it!

The secret was no doubt that I went for a meat recipe. They used pork ribs and the result was there was more of a savory full-flavored meat and vegetable taste than a beet taste. It wasn't the borshch of the old days, but it was an incredibly tasty meal, and I'm most certainly going to do it again.

I've been moving steadily in the direction of vegetarianism over the years, but I'm getting near the end of my days and I've decided it's about time to go with things that look good, feel good and taste good instead or things that might enable me to live forever. If it don't taste good, ain't no way it's going on my table anymore. 

Thought I'd share the recipe. 

You'll need a soup pot for the final product, a separate saucepan to cook the potatoes in, and a large fry pan to sauté the beet, tomato paste and garlic in.

Ingredients:

• about a pound of pork ribs. If you use bone-in, you'll have to pull them out of the pot and separate and throw away the bone, at some point. I used boneless. I leave it to you to decide how much fat to leave on. Don't cut it all off; it provides flavor.
• 1 medium-sized onion, chopped
• 2 carrots, grated
• 1 large beet, peeled and grated
• tomato paste, a large spoonful
• 2 or 3 potatoes, chopped small
• 1/4 of a head of cabbage, shredded, maybe a bit more
• parsley in two separate bunches, one whole bunch and one chopped
• fresh dill, some chopped for soup, some chopped or left whole for garnish
• 1 or 2 bay leaves
• salt and pepper
• 3 garlic cloves, pressed or finely chopped
• sour cream

1. Brown the ribs on both sides in the borshch (soup) pot, where everything will end up eventually, and transfer to the second pot with about 8 cups of water and a bunch of parsley, which you will eventually discard. Simmer for an hour or more.
2.  As they are browning, grate the carrots and the beet (food processor or hand grater) and set aside.
3.  Add the chopped potatoes to the beef pot and continue to simmer until cooked but still firm, another 15-20 minutes. Or skip this step - it makes no sense to me - and just add the chopped potatoes with the cabbage later on. (See #7 below.) I followed the recipe as I found it, because I like to do that the first time I try things to get a base line.
4.  In the first pot, brown the onions in the pork fond (the grease and particles left over after browning) and add the grated carrots to the same pot and cook for a minute or two. Add a little of the potato water if you need to at the end to prevent burning and sticking.
5. Sauté the grated beet with the tomato paste and garlic and add to the onions and carrots.
6. Separate the meat from the bone, if you've used bone-in meat. And discard the parsley, as well. Then add everything to the first pot: meat, potatoes and cooking liquid.
7. Add the shredded cabbage.
   
8. Add a good bit of salt and pepper and the bay leaves, chopped dill and chopped parsley.
9. Simmer for a couple hours, adding boiling water as necessary to keep the borshch thick but not too soupy. Remove from heat when it feels done and reheat before serving. Or, better yet, just leave it on a slow simmer until you're ready to eat. But watch out it doesn't burn.
10. Garnish each bowl with sour cream and dill when serving. Serve with dark bread.

I'm inclined to see recipes which ask you to cook something and set it aside to be added later as too fussy. Why not just put everything in at the same time and cook till it's all done? Isn't that the best way to marry flavors, in the end? My Japanese chef husband wants to smack me hard when I say things like that. I'm not the ultimate authority. But I do think it's probably a good idea to sauté things separately when you can before adding them to water. In a recipe like this, which cooks for hours, the potatoes will lose their separate character, so I don't think it matters much whether you cook them separately before adding to the stew-like mix, but I do think the onions should be cooked before adding, and many recipes suggest cooking the beets before adding as well. I leave it to you to find your own food guru.

A side note on the spelling of borshch. Borshch, in English, is generally spelled "borscht" and that comes, if I am not mistaken, from the Yiddish version of the soup: באָרשט‎  (bawrsht), i.e., with a "t" at the end, brought to the U.S. by Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe. I'm using the transliteration of the Russian/Ukrainian (they are the same) word: борщ, b-o-r-shch.  The letter щ is pronounced like the -sti in the way most Americans pronounced the word "Christian," where the s turns into an sh.  Khrushchev, is spelled Хрущев, by the way, if you'll permit me to beat this point into the ground.

If you do make it, and it makes you feel all warm and cozy, drink a toast to all the decent Russians there are out there in this big wide world. Forget the Trumpian ones that hacked into our security services, murdered Kashoggi and invaded the Crimea. Watch a YouTube video of one of my top three favorite pianists (just below Martha Argerich and just ahead - but not by much - of Cateen, aka Sumino Hayato): Alexander Malofeev, playing Poulenc with Sandro Nebieridze. And remember that these two boys come from countries now very hostile to each other, one run by Putin and one the birthplace of Joseph Stalin.  Georgians eat borshch also. Here's a Georgian recipe for borshch virtually identical to the one above, with celery and coriander added. 

Photo credit: The photo above is from the Wikipedia site on borsht. I should have thought to take a picture of the borsht we had for supper last night, but it's all gone and so this is the best I can do.

Pablo y Kiko

If you're a member of a despised or threatened minority group, you'll be familiar with the practice of "tribal spotting." A Jewish friend of mine once told me that the first thing he does when he enters a room full of strangers is to see if he can figure out who the other Jews are. I once had a group of gay friends who would get together regularly. We used to laugh at one member of the group who spent most of his time whispering about celebrities and wondering if they were members of the tribe. We used to tease him about being able to spot which fire hydrants were gay and which were straight.

You do that as a defense mechanism. It's always important, when the world is out to get you, to know who you might turn to in a pinch. Totally understandable.

I'm lucky to live in a part of the country, in a part of the world, where gay people are no longer despised and unwelcome. And that means fussing over who's gay and who's not is a practice worth tossing out. But some of us are too conditioned to paranoid behavior to be able to do that. Some of us fear the South (or wherever the homophobes live) will rise again.

Jewish paranoia, given the long tradition of anti-Semitism, is not unjustified. In Germany alone, from Luther to Hitler it lay just below the surface, waiting for a Trump kind of low-life to dog whistle it to the surface. Or, in Hitler's case, to make it national policy.  Even today, although Germany has done an excellent job, in my view, of shaking off that curse, it still pops up.  Nobody can forget the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where marchers shouted "Jews will not replace us!" 

We inherited the Jewish fear of extinction which led the ancient Hebrews to come up with the notion that all non-reproductive sex - masturbation, prostitution, and of course homosexual acts, had to be proscribed. The Catholic Church picked it up and ran with it because they needed to control marriage so that they could control property. The Jews are OK with birth control these days. Not so the Church of Rome.

That means lesbians and gays pretty much had to wait until the power of the church waned sufficiently for there to be some room for people to stop fussing over other people's sexual practices. And of course it's not just the Catholics. Authoritarian Protestant groups like the fundamentalists and Mormons took the same path in focusing on Old Testament injunctions against same-sex practices.

This topic was once front and center in American life when gay people decided to put their efforts into supporting same-sex marriage. There were always two distinct subgroups among LGBT people: those who wanted nothing more than to be seen and accepted as "normal," and have the same civil rights that heterosexual citizens had, and those who wanted the opposite - to be noticed as different, whether

scene from the documentary "Queer Japan"

motived by the need to signal their gay identity to other gays, or out of a love of theater and the recognition of the power of satire to poke fun at the absurdity of rigid gender distinctions. Some went for flashy clothes, and some pushed "noticeable" into the outrageous. These days the drag queens with the Dolly Parton hair are still with us (and I hope they will always be - who needs more dull people?) But most of the rest of us have retired into an attitude of "who cares?" People who are happy with their own sexuality are seldom preoccupied with the sexuality of others. And now that we are free to be gay, it's time, they (we) say, to stop trying to identify all the gay fire hydrants.

I'm focused on this topic at the moment because of a wonderful video that showed up on YouTube of two guys dancing together. They are Pablo and Kiko, and you should have a look. Unless you're a homophobe, it will bring a smile to your face to watch these two professional dancers do what they do so well, evidently spontaneously, and showing off their tremendous talent.

For me, the delight increased when friends launched into the the (still) inevitable question of whether these guys were gay or straight and I realized that my first response was, "What does it matter? They make me feel good." They present themselves as straight, and I think one should begin by accepting what people say about themselves as true. The delight is in the fact that straight people no longer need to bend themselves into pretzels proving they're not gay. If these guys are straight, they're having such a great time being sensual, even sexual, with each other, without any evident concern for the possibility gay people like my fire hydrant friend are going to insist they're gay. It simply doesn't matter.

Things do get better.

Check out this video. The dance they are doing is a modified bachata, a dance originally from the Dominican Republic. The dancers are from Spain and they have added bits from salsa and tango to the mix and smoothed out the boxstep with silky hip movements. And it doesn't hurt that they've got great music to dance to, "The Kiss" by Pablo Alborán.  Look at it and celebrate the progress of gay liberation, and the fact that we can now respond to the gay identification question with a hearty "Who the hell cares?" Or just enjoy the beauty of two dancers doing what they do so well.

Pablo y Kiko.

Not my favorite Californians

My friend Bill and I have been tossing around the question of whether what's going on is a coup attempt. If you think of a coup exclusively in military terms, it was not. And because it was so incompetently planned, and never actually got off the ground, you'd have to call it a coup manqué. That's French for, well, you know...

Four California Republicans signed on to the coup attempt led by State Attorney General Ted Paxton of Texas when he filed a lawsuit to overthrow the 2020 presidential election. Their names are Ken Calvert, Kevin McCarthy, Doug La Malfa and Tom McLintock.

It's one thing when white supremacists from Alabama or Mississippi attempt to halt, or at least slow down, the ragged American plodding toward a more-inclusive national culture since it first formed a government in which only white males could vote. I feel a great sympathy for the progressive citizens of those states who have to live with those retrograde forces with their hands on the local controls, but I don't really feel a strong affinity or sense of responsibility for what goes on there. I do however care very much when I see similar backwardness in my home state of California. I identify as a Californian and when I see abuse by its political leaders, I take it personally. So when I noted that there were actually four of them, I sat up and took notice. And don't take Bill's or my word for it. David Blount, a state senator from Mississippi called it a coup, and so did Attorney General William Tong of Connecticut. 

The Spanish word for coup d'état is golpe de estado.  And you've got to love the Germans for coming up with an actual onomatopoeia: Putsch!  The Putschists (puccisti?) didn't pull it off because all but two members of the Supreme Court recognized that Texas did not have standing, and even those two (Thomas and Alito) said they would reject the effort even if the court had taken the case.

Others are maintaining (see Ross Douthat in today's New York Times Review section) that it wasn't a real coup because they had to know they couldn't get the play through the court and what they were up to was a kind of performance art, designed to drum up support for Trump in the future, rather than a legal move. As far as I'm concerned, however, if it crawls on its belly like a coup and stands on its hind legs like a coup, it's a coup.

Let me move on to the four Californians. I checked out their background to see what makes them tick. What I found had me nodding "of course, of course." Just what I expected. Classic foot-draggers. Modern world? No, not me. Just look at the record the four of them have created for themselves since they were first elected:

1. Ken Calvert - California is a microcosm of American political sentiment, with progressives in the cities and conservatives in the rural areas. Ken Calvert represents the 42nd Congressional District, that rural district east of L.A. and south of Riverside that is solidly Republican. No surprises there. But Calvert's politics are not merely conservative. Among his positions are a strongly anti-abortion stance, and a requirement that teenage girls seeking an abortion must get their parents' permission. He's opposed to the creation of any new gun laws, to the Affordable Care Act, and to amnesty for any illegal aliens living in the U.S. He opposed same-sex marriage rights and marijuana as therapy for returning military, even if approved by their doctors. He admitted to having sex with a prostitute in his car when stopped by the police in his hometown, but was not arrested, because there were no witnesses.

2. Kevin McCarthy -  Kevin McCarthy represents California's 23rd Congressional District and has done so for the past thirteen years. He's Boehner's successor as House Minority Leader so he's one of the power brokers. The 23rd is in South Central California, centered in Bakersfield. It borders on the Mojave Desert, is largely rural and 76% white. Republican till the cows come home, in other words. McCarthy voted to defund Planned Parenthood, no surprise. Nor is it surprising that he votes the full party platform, and is known for having boasted that the Benghazi investigations against Hillary Clinton is what brought her down, thus demonstrating that the attacks on her were instrumental ones. It was not about truth-seeking. He was similarly shady about his support for Trump during the impeachment, and also for QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia for a time. He opposed proxy voting in the house to help lower the risk of spreading Covid-19, and tried (and failed) to sue Nancy Pelosi for even suggesting the idea. He proposed a bill that would make the Hyde Amendment permanent, a means of preventing government funding for abortion. He does not accept that there is scientific consensus on climate change and consistently opposes both domestic and international efforts to deal with such. He was primary author of efforts to strip 60 million acres of public lands of protection against logging, mineral and fossil fuel extraction. He supported Israel's annexation of the West Bank. He's one of the leaders of the efforts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. When Trump suspended DACA, he opposed efforts to protect these child immigrants. He opposed same-sex marriage and efforts to legalize marijuana.

As I write this, the little voice in my head asks me, "Why are you stating the obvious. The guy's a Republican, for Christ's sake! 

3. Doug La Malfa - Represents California's 1st Congressional District, the technical name for which has to be "serious boonies" - the northeasternmost corner of the state. It has gone Democratic at times, but La Malfa has represented the district since he was first elected in 2012 and reelected four times. He is a fourth-generation rice farmer, and is the recipient of the largest amount of money ever from government agricultural subsidies. He also oversees agricultural subsidies as a member of the House Agricultural Committee. (But note the ambiguity in the reporting on that issue by the local paper.) He's got an A rating from the NRA and the Human Rights Campaign calls him "one of the most 'anti-LGBT' politicians in congress." He was an early supporter of the effort to overturn Affirmative Action and favored giving local law enforcement the right to act as immigration enforcement officers. He succeeded in getting a law passed which prevents the state from seizing guns even in a national emergency. He opposed the teaching in schools of the history of the gay rights movement and efforts to overturn the Electoral College system. He rejects, like McCarthy, the consensus on climate change. 

Again - a Republican. And you expected maybe a Quaker?

4. Tom McLintock -  Represents California's 4th Congressional District, the great "Empty Quarter" of the state, from Truckee down to the edge of Sequoia National Park, the part of the state comprised largely of national forests, including Yosemite, and arguably the most beautiful part of the state. Urban it is not. McLintock only today addressed Congress and made great sense in criticizing the lockdown as being unfairly applied. Problem is, rather than addressing the unfair application of the law, he argues for lifting the lockdown entirely, despite the fact that it is now roundly recognized throughout the world as being an appropriate measure as the Corona virus continues to spike.  In 2008, McLintock voted against Prop. 2, which would have prohibited the confinement of animals in cages too small to allow them to stretch out their legs. "Farm animals are food, not friends." (Wikipedia on Tom McLintock). The following year he promised to vote against any taxes that would support legislation to prevent global warming. In his five terms in office he sponsored three bills, one to help the Miwok Indians and two to rename post offices. He doubts the science on climate change and is opposed to same-sex marriage. He has, however, supported the legalization of marijuana. He would like to dismantle the Affordable Care Act.

There. A quick-and-dirty overview of some of our proud California congressmen of the Republican persuasion, and further confirmation of the rural-urban divide in America. (I won't make any attempts to bring in wealth or religion or race as explanatory factors, which I'm not sure I could do. What does show up, though, nice and clearly is the urban-rural divide.) I would question those who justify these Trump-no-matter-what-he-does supporters on the grounds they are afraid of losing their seats in the future. All of these guys come from totally Republican areas. The question is going to be whether supporting the Trump coup attempt will hurt them in the future. That depends on how far right and uninformed or uncaring the citizens of these districts are. I'm hoping they can be made aware of what wretched representation in Congress they have saddled themselves with.

I don't know what I expected to accomplish by laying these facts out. I just wanted to know what these advocates of a legal coup looked like up closer than I would normally want to look at them.

I'm not sorry I did. It reminds me once again that people who claim there is no real difference between Republicans and Democrats are out of their ever-lovin' minds.

And that may be the cherry on top of all the obvious understatements I've made in the last one hundred years.

Can we do it two cents at a time?

I’m sure no sooner had some prehistoric Bill Gates type first observed what happened when you rubbed two sticks together than the world divided itself into what we today call glass half-full and glass half-empty types. The former would stress the fact that "we can now keep warm and make food taste better;” the latter would worry about their house burning down and how they were going to treat all the village idiots who insisted no government was going to take away their right to stick their hands in the flames.

These days we are waking up to the fact that the computer age has brought a similar test of intelligence. There are those who see the internet as a huge leap forward in spreading information. And those who understand that for every soul it lifts out of provincialism and ignorance it also provides an opportunity to listen to more deceptive politicians or TV evangelists than ever before, more opportunity to exhibit what, if you like to use fancy-talk, you might label epistemic incapacity. You might also prefer the more down-home term, bullshit.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge. Specifically, it deals with the difference between verifiable fact and arbitrary opinion based on a desire to mold reality according to one’s desires. History records Gutenberg's invention of the printing press as a great-leap-forward moment in history. It downplays the fact that we now had a mechanism for spreading misinformation and prejudice. Martin Luther made Germans literate by translating the Bible and making priests redundant. But he also helped foster the anti-Semitism that was out and about in Germany at the time. Then it was the printed word; these days it's the spoken word delivered through television and computer, that is the primary mixed blessing of the age. It can inform and educate, but it can also misinform and deceive, if you don’t have the basic capacity to tell the difference between accurate information and bullshit. Like fire, it is not a solution to all our problems, but a tool that requires discipline and training to use properly.

Over the past four years, we’ve reeled in shock at how often Americans have ignored outrageous deception on the part of our political leaders - Trump in particular, but the problem was never limited to one person. And now that the majority of Americans have thrown the bum out, we are still faced with daily evidence of just how dumbed down the population has become. I’m thinking of such things as the resistance to wearing masks in the face of Covid-19. 

I love that Steven Weinberg quote: “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.” And I would amend that to include not just evil but also rank stupidity. In many Christian churches people drink communion wine from the same chalice. In the Greek Orthodox Church, they use a spoon, and, even in the midst of the Corona pandemic, traditionalists are arguing that God would not want us to alter the practice. And will keep us safe.

Americans are no smarter and no dumber than the rest of the world, of course. In Germany the new rightist party, the AfD (Alternative for Germany), are fighting over whether to get behind the national “Mundschutz” (i.e., “mouth protection”) policy.  Never mind that the protection they’re arguing over should cover the nose as well as the mouth. The fact that virtually any medical authority anywhere will tell you the risk of spreading infection is lowered considerably by its use. This is not an issue we should be wasting our time arguing over.

I understand that there is a debate over whether the high cost of these protection measures, masking and physical distancing, is too big a price to pay. People who see up close the damage done to people living in isolation, the damage to kids who can’t get out to go to school or play with their friends, the risk of bankrupting countless businesses, are making good sense. It’s a judgment call whether to prioritize the health of the economy and psychological well-being over people’s individual lives, particularly the old and the physically compromised. I see it as a moral issue. For me lives come first, but I understand there are lots of people out there who don’t feel any obligation to protect the general public, and no doubt assume taking their chances is a reasonable course of action. And we have to live with these people.

I just wish we had better mechanisms to expose the sources of misinformation effectively. I admit I don’t know how to do it. Some urge patient interaction and the need to communicate effectively and not surrender to righteous indignation. I feel a responsibility to move in that direction. But I find it so damned hard. It’s bad enough at normal times to have to listen to people who believe in astrology and make decisions on the basis of Tarot cards. But these are life-and-death times, and when you find people listening to known liars and self-serving politicians, isn’t it irresponsible to go on about the importance of the “free exchange of information?”

 

I’m currently going through all the lectures, debates and panel discussions I can find over this fascinating man, Jordan Peterson, and trying to decide whether his “free speech” stance makes him heroic or just another fool who doesn’t know how to use his nose to smell the coffee. I’m not on the fence. I’m for free speech, and I buy his argument that responsibility is central and we can’t run a democracy without maximizing the uninhibited flow of information, and that we can’t let our personal assessment of the accuracy of that information distract us.

 

But it’s hard. Super hard to suffer fools when lives are at stake.

 

I welcome anyone who wants to contribute to the discussions I’ve been having with friends on this issue of free speech to chime in. Please don’t just simply declare you’re for free speech. Please tell me why, at this particular time, in the midst of plague, we can’t do anything about the bullshit. Other than continue to put in our two cents, I mean.