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.