From Russia With Beets

Who does culture belong to?

While that idea is certainly integral to discussions on politics or social issues, nowhere does that question resonate more than in the world of food. Who does pasta belong to? Depends on if you’re referencing long, thin, strands made from wheat flour off the Japanese islands that came from China, or wide sheets of egg-based lasagna from the city of Bologna. While both Italy and East Asian countries like China and Japan developed what we consider “pasta” today, there’s not a clear link between the two countries. No one traveler, like the fabled Marco Polo, brought noodles from one country to the other; they were just developed independently of each other, thousands of miles apart. However, if you zoom out, which culture do noodles belong to? Who can lay claim to them?

Who do burritos made with ground beef and cotija cheese, found along the Texas/Mexico border, belong to? Named for a Mexican town in the province of Michoacán, Cotija cheese is a crumbly mixture made from cow’s milk used in Meso-American cuisine but rarely found in the United States. Meanwhile, ground beef is a true product of Texas, which is home to 13 million cows, more than the next highest states, Nebraska and Kansas, combined In fact, beef is rarely used in Mexican cuisine; chicken and pork are more common. The subsequent ingredients further complicate the dish. Cumin is a clear Texan spice, and so are flour tortillas, yet the dish feels unquestionably Mexican, especially to most Americans. The fusion of ingredients that have distinctly different cultural backgrounds begs the question: who can lay claim to the burrito?

Who does chocolate belong to? Depends on if you mean the bitter, thick, drink originating in the Americas or the flaky pain au chocolat from France. The dark, hard-shelled cacao beans are from South America, and their product was a key part of pre-Columbian Mayan cuisine. Mayans ground the beans with water, adding in chilis for flavor. Yet the English (and Spanish) word for chocolate doesn’t come from the Mayan language. It comes from the Aztec word, xocolatl, after the Aztecs conquered the Mayans and their chocolate. The Aztecs used chocolate as a religious symbol, and even as currency. Some five thousand miles away, in Paris, that same cacao plant is such an integral part of French culture that a debate about just the name for the famed pain au chocolat ended up in front of the French Parliament in 2018. Would a chocolate croissant under any other name taste just as sweet? Not according to the French Parliament, who ruled that the name for the flakey, chocolate-filled pastry was pain au chocolat only, and not chocolatine, the title from Gascony in the southwest of France. Gascony croissants are identical to Parisian croissants; the only difference lies in the name. In the debate, parliament member Aurélien Pradié argued for adding chocolatine to the definition, stating, “this is not just a chocolatine amendment. It’s an amendment that aims to protect popular expressions that give value to culinary expertise.”

If it seems extreme that a nation’s government, responsible for organizing healthcare,

military defense, education, and more would spend a session arguing about chocolate, that’s

because it’s symbolic. Food is representative of culture, and it’s arguably the most adaptable part.

It twists and turns as the land where it is cultivated changes hands; from Mayans to Aztecs, from

Paris to Gascony, from Italy to Japan. Yet because of that same fluidity that makes food

interesting, the ability to assert ownership over a recipe has been notoriously difficult to pin

down. A dish that best explains this strenuous link between culture and food is a former peasant

food from one of the most disputed modern borders: borscht.

So, what is borscht? Is it deep red, with slices of beets floating in it? Or is clear, and

made from cow parsnips? Sour? Sweet? Does a dollop of sour cream sit in the center? Is it

flavored with beef? Is it Russian? Or is it Ukrainian?

History points at the answer in two different directions, depending on where you draw the

line between the past and the present. Historians estimate that borscht first appeared in what is

now Ukraine, sometime between the 5th and 9th centuries. It was a humble dish; peasants boiled

cow parsnips when they grew in the spring, sometimes adding eggs or meat to the soup. Nearly a

millennium later, in the 17th century, the dish made it to the nobility class, who added cabbage,

oats, lemon, and rye. Towards the end of the century, a “red borscht” appeared, for the first time.

However, this is where the story gets tricky. The red borscht, made with beetroots, originated

from ethnic Ukrainians living in occupied Russian territories. So, who does borscht belong to?

The soup continued to change as it passed between cultures. In the 19th century, some

added potatoes and tomatoes, which were originally products of the Americas. Polish Christians

enjoyed borscht made with fish stock on Christmas eve. Jews across the Slavic nations removed

the meat to make the dish kosher, serving cold borscht topped with sour cream on the holiday of

Shavuot. Their descendants took the dish west when they fled Russia, bringing borscht to the

United States in the mid 20th century. Back in the Soviet Union, which enveloped modern-day

Ukraine, this dish became a national treasure. Borscht appears in Soviet literature, in the state-

produced cookbook The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, and in the kitchens of the Kremlin and

villages alike. Even Russian astronauts brought it to space.

Through some trick of the Jewish diaspora, the dish made its way to me. I remember the

first time I tried borscht, as a young child, lying on the couch while I waited for lunch. My

parents burst through the door into my grandparents' Chicago apartment, their arms laden with

the traditional Jewish deli food that we could never find in my hometown of Seattle. Brushing

past me, they dropped sandwiches filled with sliced corned beef, layered with briny cabbage and

topped with two slices of rye, onto the counter, followed by plastic containers of salty matzah

ball soup, a box of heavily scented cinnamon rugelach, and latkes bigger than my hands. Finally,

they set down a mysterious bright red soup.

The borscht of my childhood is nothing like the Ukrainian, Catholic Polish, or Russian

soup found in culinary history books. It was sweet, with a kick of vinegar in a thin red broth.

Slices of beets floated in it, mingled with cabbage, and a dollop of sour cream lingered into the

center. In the summer, we served it cold to combat the sticky midwest humidity, and in the winter

we would warm it on the stove, swirling in the melted cream. There were no potatoes or

parsnips, and there was certainly no pork. I didn’t particularly care for beets or cabbage as a six-

year-old, but I loved the sweetness of the soup, and so I slurped up spoonfuls until my hands and

cheeks were stained red.

Jewish borscht stems back, of course, to the Jews that fled Russia, Poland, Ukraine, and

Lithuania in the late 19th century and early 20th century, and sought asylum in the United States.

My great grandparents were among them. There, borscht took on the same responsibility of

representing a culture’s identity, except this time for the blended ethnicity of American Jews. The

borscht I described, both sweet and sour, is a blend between the pickled Jewish Lithuanian

borscht and the sugary Jewish Polish Borscht. In the United States, they became one.

As Jews migrated to the coast of the United States, settling in New York and New Jersey,

they were unable to fully assimilate into the white, upper class, east coast society. So, the new

class of American Jews created their own traditions. In the summer, they packed cars or boarded

trains and followed State Route 17 north, into upstate New York. There laid a constellation of

summer resorts, affectionately titled “The Borscht Belt” because of the food’s connection to

Jewish American culture, where Jews could vacation without fear of being turned away. These

resort homes, depicted in the 1987 film Dirty Dancing, became their own subset of Jewish

American life where Jews could celebrate, dance, and eat with each other. There, they enjoyed

the borscht of my memory, the sugary Manischewitz soup that bears little resemblance to a

peasant dish made of cow parsnips and chicken.

Yet, despite all of this, the dish is still culturally important in Ukraine, where the media

sometimes uses the cost of producing borscht in foreign countries to compare the purchasing

power of different countries. It is impossible to call the dish Russian when its roots are firmly

planted in rural Ukraine. At the same time, however, one cannot ignore the way borscht has

firmly integrated itself into modern Russian culture, even standing as a symbol for the cuisine of

the Soviet Union. For multiple periods throughout the past millennium, the history of Ukraine

has been that of Russia; with Ukrainian cultural traditions merged, altered, and in some cases

erased completely. Especially in the past half-century, the Russian government has reasserted

their claim to borscht, as if to say, “has it ever been anything else?” On the outskirts of this

debate lie Polish Catholics and New York Jews; even though borscht certainly did not originate

in the lush, green forests of the Catskills or the cobbled streets of Warsaw, their conflicting

additions to the dish are still part of its history.

The conflict between Ukraine and Russia is not over beet soup. Surprisingly, though,

borscht is a strangely important pawn. In early November of 2020, chef Ievgen Klopotenko from

the town Borshchiv, Ukraine created an organization to assert Ukraine’s cultural sovereignty over

borscht. With the support of the Ukrainian parliament, he plans to submit an application for

UNESCO cultural status in March. In the six years since the annexation of Crimea, the Ukrainian

people have been unable to get their land back. But, in their eyes, they could get their soup.

If you traveled between Kiev and Moscow, sampling soups along the way, you could

taste the culture war within the layers of vegetables. From the Soviet-era beet borscht inscribed

in Stalin’s cookbook to the Ukrainian borscht which may soon have UNESCO distinction, the

soups are not the same. Still, the main question remains unanswered. Can Russians, Ukrainians,

Polish Christians, or American Jews really assert ownership over a (literally) fluid dish? For

each, their claim to the dish is as strong as their claim to the land it grows on; infinitely disputed,

but nonetheless, still a part of their story.