Borscht: the deep red soup of Eastern Europe

Few soups announce themselves like borscht. The colour arrives before the smell: a red so deep it is nearly purple, which blooms into pink at the edges the moment you stir in a spoonful of sour cream. It looks like a soup with a story, and it is.

Borscht is cooked across a wide sweep of Eastern Europe, in more versions than anyone could count. Every family seems to have its own, and every one of them is the right one.

A soup older than its beets

The name is usually traced to an old Slavic word for hogweed, a wild plant whose leaves and stems were once soured and cooked into soup. Beetroot came later. Over time the red, beet-based version became the one most people mean when they say borscht. I enjoy knowing that the world's most famous beet soup was not originally about beets at all.

Today you will find borscht in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania and well beyond, and it travelled with Ashkenazi Jewish cooks to kitchens around the world. It is most closely associated with Ukraine, where it is about as close to a national dish as anything gets.

Ukrainian borscht

In Ukraine, borscht is a full meal rather than a starter. A typical pot begins with a meat broth, often beef or pork, though meatless versions are common too. Beets go in with cabbage, potatoes, carrots and onions, usually some tomato, and the balance of sweet, sour and savoury is a matter of family pride. A little acid, such as vinegar or lemon juice, is the classic trick for keeping the beets a bright red rather than letting them fade to brown.

It comes to the table with smetana, a thick sour cream, and often with pampushky: soft little bread rolls brushed with garlic and herbs, made for tearing and dipping. A scattering of dill on top is common. There are green versions too, made sour with sorrel, that belong to spring.

In 2022, UNESCO inscribed the culture of Ukrainian borscht cooking on its List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. What it recognises is not a single recipe but the whole living practice around the pot: the regional varieties, the knowledge handed between generations, and the way the dish gathers people together. The urgency in that title reflects the war, and the threat it poses to the communities who keep the tradition going.

I find that a moving idea. A soup is one of the most ordinary things in the world, and also one of the things people hold onto hardest.

Barszcz and the Polish table

Cross into Poland and the soup becomes barszcz. The best known, barszcz czerwony (red barszcz), is often a clear, ruby-red broth, sour and clean. It may be sipped from a cup, or served with tiny mushroom-filled dumplings called uszka, "little ears".

Red barszcz with uszka is a traditional part of Wigilia, the Polish Christmas Eve supper. It is a very different creature from a thick Ukrainian pot full of vegetables, which is exactly why the word borscht covers so much ground. It names a family, not a recipe.

Cold and pink

When summer comes, borscht can turn cold. The most striking example is Lithuanian šaltibarščiai, a chilled soup of beets, cucumber, dill and spring onion in kefir or buttermilk. The colour is an almost unbelievable pink, the kind you would not dare put in a food photograph if you had not seen it yourself.

It is usually served with hot boiled potatoes on the side, which is a lovely contrast: cold, tangy soup and steaming potatoes in alternating spoonfuls. If you like the idea of a soup that cools you down, the Spanish gazpacho is its sunny counterpart from the other end of Europe.

How to eat it

• Stir the smetana in slowly. Watch the red turn to pink, then taste the difference it makes. The sour cream rounds off the edges of the acid.
• Use the bread. If pampushky arrive, tear them and swipe them through the bowl. The garlic is the point.
• Give it a day, if you are cooking. Many cooks swear borscht tastes better the next day, once the flavours have settled into each other.
• Choose your season. A hot, meaty pot in winter; a cold, pink bowl in summer. Both are borscht.
• Mind your shirt. Beet stains are famously stubborn.

Borscht belongs to kitchens more than restaurants, and to people more than places. A recipe can be written down, but the version that matters is the one someone learned by standing next to someone else at the stove. That, I think, is what is really being protected when we talk about saving a soup.