I wasn’t expecting to find a tempest in a stockpot in Crimea, where I recently spent a month covering a story on that part of southern Ukraine. But that’s what happened when I met Galina Onischenko, a devoutly pro-Russian citizen of Sevastopol. Galina invited me over for lunch at her fifth-floor walk-up apartment and served borscht. Even before my spoon hit the soup, she wanted me to know that her borscht was Russian. Her tone implied that borscht from any other Slavic country was not even worth mentioning.

There are no political boundaries when it comes to recipes, but no surprise, either, to food being a sticking point (dare we say a flashpoint in a pan?) for nationalist rivalries and tension. Think of the culinary kafuffle of 2003 when U.S. conservatives renamed French fries “freedom fries” to express anti-French sentiment during international debate over the launch of the Iraq invasion. And so it is with borscht. Just ask Galina.

“Borscht,” says Anya von Bremzen, author of Please to the Table: The Russian Cookbook, “is adapted and sometimes even claimed by Russians, Polish, Lithuanian, Moldovans, but it’s actually from Ukraine.” Ukrainian borscht has pork fat in it, the infamous salo that is practically a patriotic birthright, whereas borscht from Moldova is made with fermented beets, and borscht in Belarus is given its kick by tomatoes. “In Slavic countries, borscht is a part of everyone’s life,” she says.

Sometimes too much. For those, like von Bremzen, who endured the privation of Soviet Russia, where the sighting of a banana was a major event and borscht the dreary, greasy, institutional constant in schools and workplace cafeterias, “you almost can’t stand to see it.”

Borscht can bring passions to a boil even within the borders of one country. James Meek in the Guardian reports an Internet forum exchange between western and eastern Ukrainian borschtophiles over the question of beets. When “Leena” from western Ukraine posted a comment saying that her eastern Ukrainian grandmother made borscht without beetroot, “Charlie” berated her for slandering eastern Ukraine. “Oh, western Ukraine. Always ready to accuse eastern Ukraine of any cardinal sin,” he wrote. “Borscht without beetroot? How could you make up such a thing?”

How indeed? After all, the word borscht comes from the Ukrainian word борщ, which means beet, though there is a Polish “white” borscht, called zarek, traditionally served at Easter, from which beets are unaccountably missing. Whatever its lineage, let me tell you there is nothing like a fragrant, steaming bowl of borscht to soothe the soul and nourish the body. Now, pay attention: Galina says the secret of borscht is in the chopping. You must dice the vegetables into very small cubes, say, the size of a fingernail. She is adamant about this. “You cannot be lazy.”

  Galina’s Russian Borscht

3 potatoes
1 carrot
1 red beet
1 onion
One bunch of sorrel
Dill, bay leaf, garlic, parsley.

Make beef bouillon (.5 kg of meat with bone in 2.5 liters of water)
Cut potatoes in cubes; boil in bouillon slowly for 10 minutes.
Slice carrot, beet, and onion and fry in oil for 10 minutes. Add to Bouillon, boil slowly.
Add sorrel, dill, salt, and pepper.
Boil 10 to 15 minutes more.
Enjoy with sour cream.

—Cathy Newman

Photo: Galina Onischenko in her kitchen. Photograph by Cathy Newman

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