In food… They make a meal called борщ (borshch). It is not a soup. It is not a stew. It is borshch, a national dish, a meal, which is its own category. Do not dare to call borshch a soup, though the preparation of borshch will feel familiar to the preparation of a soup. Every family and every chef makes borshch in their own way. The taste will vary from home to home and across generations in a home. You associate your family’s borshch with certain aspects of home and safety and security, and these are different from the flavors and associations in the borshch in another home. Some women can make “rich borshch” and this is when their life experiences can lend a depth and complexity to the meal that other women’s life experiences cannot yet lend.
The ingredients are what define borshch, while the preparation gives it body and life.
First, in the fresh meat market, you will select your pork leg cut if you are making borshch with a meat base. The cut is usually about 6” across and 1” thick, with the bone in the middle. The meat should be pink, and soft, and moist. The feel of the meat matters. You must touch it and smell it. It cannot be too dry or too dark or too firm or start to cave in when you press it, because then you know the meat was not fresh from that morning’s slaughter. And, you must feel the density of the marrow inside the bone. The density of the marrow will create the mouth feel of the base of the borshch, and so the marrow must be moist and spongy. If the marrow is too hard or dry, you will not have a nice base.
You can also make borshch without meat, and this is typically made with beans.
You will also need vegetables for the base, including onions, carrots, and beets. You have to make sure you select borshch beets and not salad beets. To this day, after 20 years, I do not know how to select a borshch compared to a salad beet. I can tell the difference after I cook them, but I cannot tell the difference before cooking and for me, it was beet roulette at the market; I grabbed beets and hoped for the best. Svetlana Світлана Громова has been in my kitchen and has been known to say, “Oh, you only have a salad beet [perplexed tone]. Well, that’s what we’ll use for the borshch [excited tone]!”
I cannot give details on how to prepare the base and the order of the ingredients. It varies slightly from family to family. It requires a particular order, timing, constant skimming and monitoring. It takes hours.
Then, you add, again in an order particular to your own borshch, the ingredients that will form the body of the soup. Every chef cuts her vegetables in a certain way. Are they thinly sliced like matchsticks? Are they thickly sliced like wooden blocks? Are they grated? This matters for the different flavors that are released. You cook each additional vegetable in the base depending on the vegetable and the thickness of the cut… adding carrots, potatoes, onions, cabbage, beets in an order that only you know based on your slicing technique. To get the bright fuchsia color of the borshch, you must carefully time your beets and not overcook them. Too early and the color will fade. Too high of a temperature and the color will brown. At the end, you will add parsley and dill. When you dish this into bowls, you will serve this with a large spoon of sour cream. The cream should blend completely with the base and the resulting color should be an opaque and beautiful bright pink.
You should have fresh bread in thick slices on the plate. Fresh means you bought it as a loaf and it was baked recently, even that morning. Fresh bread is normal. There are bread kiosks (small sheds devoted to only selling bread) sprinkled throughout cities, so you can always find fresh bread. You can even buy a “half loaf” if you need less than a full loaf. What a luxury to have fresh bread every day. The crust should be firm and the inside soft. When you dip the bread in the borshch, the bread should hold its shape and soak in the pink base.
It was fine to leave your borshch on the stove. You need not put it in the fridge. It usually does not last long enough to need refrigeration. You simply reheat it high enough to be safe when you have your next bowl.
And whenever visitors come to your house, you will offer them borshch and tea. Ukrainians feed and nourish others with their generosity, and they want to see you leave warm and full.
And then there’s green borshch in the summer, but that is a whole other borshch…
I am inviting my friends who are safe to post their borshch photos in the comments. Ironically, I have not a single photo of borshch from Ukraine, because it was just so common.
