Borsch

Borsch to Eastern Europe and Russia is like hummus to the Middle East. We all eat it, we all love it, yet we simply can’t imagine that any other country owns the rights to it. It has its origin in a hogweed soup commonly consumed by the Slavs from the fifteenth or sixteenth century in territories occupied today by Poland, Ukraine and Russia. There are so many variations of the soup, not only in each country but in different regions within those countries, that borsch often becomes synonymous with Eastern European soup. As much as I love a good traditional borsch, and to me this means a passionately red beetroot soup, cooked with a sofrito base as my Jewish–Ukrainian great grandma would do, I sometimes struggle eating a plateful of chunky discoloured vegetables that have given all their best to the broth.

So here I am taking a bit (okay, a lot) of creative licence, offering my own take on the iconic dish, which consists of a rich red broth, raw sauerkraut, roasted vegetables and baked red kidney beans. Lovers of traditional borsch recipes look away – this one is pretty iconoclastic! If you can make the broth twenty-four hours in advance, you will be rewarded with an even better tasting soup, but a few hours of resting will also do the trick.