For a dish with a centuries-long story and a strong association with the history of the Soviet Union, most of us know way too less about the Borsch. The basic knowledge goes to its Slavic roots and its main ingredient, the beetroot.
The different spelling variants – borsch, borscht, borsht, and bortsch, correspond well to the numerous recipe variations of the dish itself. Indeed, there isn’t a classical or consistent recipe for borscht in existence.
A hearty borscht formula includes beetroot, cabbage, potato, onion, carrot, tomato, garlic and among purely vegetarian, it may also include different types of meat and broth.
Probably you have noticed that we have not yet referred to borscht as a soup, as Westerns usually do, and that is for a reason, as for most Russians and Ukrainians borscht is a comfort dish of its own category.
The history of borscht is much harder to trace compared to the origin of its name. Most gastronomic historians, though, agree that the soup’s origins date to 14th century Ukraine.
A popular legend claims that in 1637 during a two-months Turkish siege of the Azor fortress in Southern Russia, the Cossacks prepared a dish for their army from everything edible found around and called the nourishing mixture of veggies and meat – borscht, supposedly making an anagram of a popular fish soup called “shcherba”.
Leaving aside all myths and legends, the plausible etymology goes to the Proto-Slavic name bŭrščǐ of the cow parsnip, or commonly known as hogweed, which was the principal ingredient of the dish during the first centuries of its existence. Eventually the better tasting cultivated beetroot replaced the wild cow parsnip, and from greenish brown, the liquid dish got a much fancier reddish colour, yet the name stuck.
The name Borscht
The name and the dish entered the English language and cuisine not through Slavic, but through Yiddish communities. When the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern and Central Europe took the dish with them to Western Europe and later to North America. The Yiddish name pronounced as borsht, naturally originates from the East Slavic борщ (borshch).
However, the first time the word was mentioned in an English source was in reference to its Russian roots, in the Memoirs and letters of Sir James Paget, 1884: “A real Russian dinner—first there was a strange thing called Borsch.”
Eight years later, the Jewish-born British author Israel Zangwill whose family immigrated from the Russian Empire, in his Children of the Ghetto, giving an inside look into the Jewish immigrant community in nineteenth-century London, pointed out the role of borscht as a favourite food of the poor members of the community: “A favourite soup was Borsch, which was made with beetroot, fat taking the place of the more fashionable cream.”
The warm relation between the Jewish community and borscht gave birth to the popular term: Borscht belt, the colloquial nickname for the summer resorts of the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, which was a popular entertainer spot for Eastern European jews.
The euphemism was firstly recorded in print in 1937, in the June issue of Vanity: “The injection of class into the borscht belt’s entertainment end. “
The story of borsch is as colourful as its ingredients. And an advice for those of our readers who got provoked by our word of the day to cook up their own variation – the thicker-the better and the taste only gets better by each passing day.
