Food of a Nation

From today's Guardian:

"Recipes, like birds, ignore political boundaries. Just as the British empire still has a culinary pulse, beating in a curry in Scotland or in the mug of builder's tea with sugar and milk you are handed in some roadhouse on the Karakorum Highway; just as the Ottoman empire breathes phantom breaths in little cups of muddy coffee from Thessaloniki to Basra; so the faint outline of the Tsarist-Soviet imperium still glimmers in the collective steam off bowls of beetroot and cabbage in meat stock, and the soft sound of dollops of sour cream slipping into soup, from the Black Sea to the Sea of Japan and, in emigration, from Brooklyn to Berlin."

Read all about the originally Ukranian dish and its continued presence in the Former Soviet Union:

The story of borshch It's just a bowl of beetroot and cabbage in meat stock, but it was the common denominator of the Soviet kitchen. So what's happened to the dish? James Meek reports