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 |
I lived in the FSU for a bit when it was still the Soviet Union, and my friends taught me a few variations. I make the variation that was predominant in my region of Southern Russia all summer long. I can't wait to read the article! (I'm off to run a teen event).
ReplyDeleteAlso, thanks for the sushi comments - I'd quite forgotten about Godaiko and yes, I love their sushi!