Not long into our conversation about borscht and the recipe I’d been working on, Darra Goldstein warned me to brace for the inevitable.
“You’ll print the recipe, and probably people will say, ‘Well, that’s not how my family makes it,’” she said with a good-natured chuckle on a video call from her home in the Berkshires.
The acclaimed author and scholar of Slavic cuisines was sharing her take on what constitutes a proper bowl of hot borscht in Ukraine, the soup’s ancestral home, and couldn’t help but note that it’s a divisive subject. She named beets, of course, for their earthy sweetness and vivid color, as well as green cabbage, carrots, onions, and potatoes—staple crops that grow abundantly in Ukrainian soil. Pork, the cuisine’s default protein, for building up a meaty backbone. Acidity from vinegar, lemon juice, tomatoes, or kvass, to invigorate the broth. Sour cream plopped onto each serving at the table, followed by feathery dill. Good bread alongside.
These markers
