Borscht: Hot and Cold and Red All Over

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When borscht arrived in America via Eastern European Jewish immigrants, it was a mystery food. Not long ago I came across a January 21, 1872, restaurant review, which appeared in The New York Times. It described the clash of culinary cultures that occurred as the reviewer experienced the foreign, hot, red soup for the first time:

“‘What is this?’ We asked, almost at random pointing to something which we translated as possibly having some faint relationship to beets.

“‘Beet soup,’ said the waiter, with a Cockney accent.

“‘Beet soup let it be then,’ we replied….In a twinkling a bowl of this compound—blood red, was put before us.

“‘What-what,’ we asked, ‘is the nationality of this dish—who invented it?’

“‘It’s Polish, sir, and quite a favorite ’ere, sir,’ he replied….Boldly we plunged in the spoon and gave it a determined stir; then our courage failed us. Of course there was nothing very repugnant in this innocent beet as a vegetable; but mostly associated with the idea of vinegar, to take a mouthful of it, set our teeth on edge. But try it we must. Slowly we brought the spoon to our mouth, then furtively looked around to see if anybody was looking, and perceiving we were unheeded, bolted it. Rather to our surprise, it was palatable; we tried it again. Perhaps it could only be appreciated by an acquired taste, and we have not the least doubt that had we kept on trying persistently we might, in the process of time, by degrees, say in six months or so, providing we had no other source of nourishment, have got to like it.”

Nearly 140 years later, borscht remains a fixture of Jewish American cuisine but is still little understood. The word comes from the Yiddish borscht and from the Ukrainian and Russian bohrshch, both meaning a soup with a beet base. “Russians and Ukrainians have been making borscht at least since the start of their civilized history going back to the 10th century,” says Darra Goldstein, professor of Russian at Williams College and author of A Taste of Russia.

In the 18th century, before potatoes were introduced, the red tuber—straight up or fermented—was the food of the masses. With fresh beet juice as the foundation, borscht could include meat, cabbage, onions, parsnips, turnips, carrots and eventually potatoes. It was served hot in winter and cold in summer. Jews tailored the recipes to conform to their dietary requirements. Beef replaced pork if meat was used, and eggs were whipped in at the last minute (a farweissen) to whiten the broth. For a dairy meal, sour cream or sour milk were added on top.

Jewish borscht became an art unto itself. I once interviewed a woman named Eva Lubetkin Cantor, who lived to be 103. She told me how Passover borscht was made at her home in New York City at the turn of the 20th century. “There was the brewing of the russel, which means brine in Russian and Yiddish, which was genuine borscht,” she explained. “The beets were put in a large barrel covered with warm water and salt. It took three or four weeks to ferment and turn sour. Every day or so, the fermentation and crust were skimmed off with a slotted ladle. When it didn’t form any sediment on top, it was ready. We just added water, sugar, eggs, sour cream and, for fleishig, meat balls and hot plain boiled potatoes.” Eugeniusz Wirkowski, the author of Cooking the Polish-Jewish Way, told me in Krakow that the main Jewish contribution to Polish cuisine is the fermentation process that Cantor had described.

Borscht achieved full-fledged iconic status in America during the 20th century with the rise of the Borscht Belt, the term used to refer to the Jewish resorts in the Catskill Mountains where numerous stage and film actors got their start. Borscht Belt comedians parodied every aspect of Jewish life in the mountains, especially the food. “Proper borscht,” quipped the comedian Joey Adams, “comes with sour cream and boiled potatoes, and some people claim that the white line on Route 17, the four-lane-path that leads from Seventh Avenue to the Catskills, is made of pure sour cream.”

After World War II, companies like Mrs. Adler’s, Mother’s and Gold’s began to manufacture sweet bottled borscht, bringing a taste of the Old World sans fermentation to America’s new supermarkets. “When our plant was in Borough Park we would go to our grandmother’s around the corner for lunch,” recalls Marc Gold, the marketing manager of Gold’s, whose grandparents, Tillie and Hyman, founded the company. “We would bring the borscht from the plant and have a dairy lunch of comfort food—borscht and sour cream with a boiled potato and mackerel. That brings me back to the early days.”

Borscht is experiencing a revival, thanks in part to the influence of the waves of immigrants from the former Soviet Union to the United States. American chefs have embraced the borscht challenge, providing inventive modern takes such as bright butternut squash borscht. By some counts, there are now over 100 bona fide varieties of the soup. I can rarely resist a hearty meat and vegetable borscht, which I learned to make from Russian immigrants. And to beat the summer heat, a bowl of cold watermelon borscht makes a wonderful first course for dinner.

Joan Nathan is a cookbook author whose latest book is Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France, due out in November.

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