Who owns delicious, delicious borsch?
Who owns delicious, delicious borsch?
The Russian government has (no joke) cited borsch as one of the reasons for the war in Ukraine. We enter the kitchen of Ukraine's premier chef to talk about its cultural impact.
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Yevhen Klopotenko is Ukraine’s most famous chef, but he might as well be a chemist the way he calls out the characteristics of his most beloved concoction.
“It has to be smoky... And then, you have to balance the taste out with some sour cream. So it's a sour, sweet, smoky, beetroot infused stock,” said , as he explained the flavor of borsch, the national dish of Ukraine.
Despite filming an entire movie about borsch across Ukraine, spending months researching and traveling to different regions of Ukraine, Yevhen can’t give me the recipe or even the ingredient list for borsch.
It’s a dish just as diverse as the country itself.
“Borsch is like Ukrainians… We are all different with all our thoughts, all our lifestyles,” he said, picking up a saucer from the table with restless, animated hands.
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This research eventually led to him to head the campaign to put borsch, spelt ‘borscht’ in English after the Yiddish spelling, on UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage In Urgent Need of Safeguarding (or Sardinian pastoral songs in Italy or Spanish flamenco).
As Russia destroys the works of iconic Ukrainian folk artists like painter Maria Prymachenko, or historic buildings like Ukrainian anarchist revolutionary Nestor Makhno’s home in Zaporizhzhia, for Yevhen and many other Ukrainians, borsch is another part of Ukrainian culture that is under threat from Russian imperialism.
And many Ukrainians felt that the threats to borsch began long before the full-scale war.
For Yevhen, this story started in 2019, when the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs tweeted their claim over borsch, sparking outrage among Ukrainians on social media.
“Make your own culture and history losers,” one comment below the post read. “Borsch is traditional UKRAINIAN dish not Russian. Russia likes to steal everything which concerns Ukraine,” another read.
While other commenters attacked the Russian soup ‘schi’, often disliked for being too watery: “Borsch is Ukrainian! Russians have “schi” (the remaining water after washing the plate after borsch),” one commenter joked.
This was the moment that inspired Yevhen’s activism: “I understood that I have to act, it's enough,” Yevhen said.
But it was only after the start of the full-scale war that borsch’s application was fast-tracked and added to UNESCO’s list. Ukraine's Minister of Culture and Information Policy, Oleksandr Tkachenko, called UNESCO's decision a "victory in the war for borsch".
In the opening months of the full-scale invasion a spokesperson for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zakharova, even said that borsch was part of why Russia invaded its neighbor: "Because you couldn't share borsch! You couldn't share it! It had to belong to just one group... only one nationality."
Nobody can deny that borsch is a popular part of cuisine in many Slavic countries.
However, Yevhen argues, that doesn’t make its origin any less Ukrainian.
Yevhen’s research has paid off: he comes armed with evidence of borsch’s Ukrainian roots.
“We [Ukrainians] have surnames that come from the word borsch, we have a village called Borsch, we have sayings in Ukrainian that use the word borsch, like the word ‘pereborschiti’ which translates ‘to over-borsch’ meaning to overdo,” Yevhen explained.
After receiving the official recognition from UNESCO, Russia had little to say.
“All the Russian Minister of Culture said was, ‘Oh, these crazy Ukrainians, why are they fighting over borsch? Borsch is for everyone.’ And that's all,” Yevhen says with a triumphant smile.
Although Yevhen has poured the last few years into defending borsch from Russian imperialism, his own journey has not been straightforward.
Throughout his movie, Yevhen constantly asks chefs a key question: “What do you associate with borsch?”
But when I asked him the question, he put his head in his hands, rubbing his temples, looked out the window and after a long pause said: “This is a very hard question.”
“It’s a changing story,” he continues. “As a child, borsch was my mother’s dish, which was not very tasteful and I was always adding fermented tomatoes to make it better.”
When Yevhen opened his own restaurant — 100 rokiv tomu vpered — which translates to something like ‘100 years ago in the future,’ he refused to serve anybody that ordered borsch in Ukrainian and insisted on customers ordering in English.
“This restaurant is about breaking stereotypes. People thought that if they came to a Ukrainian restaurant they had to ask for borsch. I wanted to make them think before they ordered: ‘Do you really want borsch?’”
At the time, Yevhen still dismissed the importance of borsch and regarded it as a stereotype of Ukrainian cuisine.
It was only later he realized really how significant it was for Ukrainians.
“One time I wrote on Facebook ‘I usually eat borsch without beans’… In ten minutes hundreds of people started to argue about borsch in the comments,” Yevhen said, as he put his curly head of hair in his hands in disbelief. “Then I understood how important it was for people. I understood that it's so much more than just a food stereotype,” Yevhen explained.
But, even then, Yevhen was still discovering how complex his relationship with borsch was:
“Only when I was 32, did I realize that my first dish was borsch. I was interviewing my father for the movie we were making and I asked him about my first memory of cooking. I just remember cutting some cabbage and crying. I asked him, ‘what were we cooking together?’ and he said it was borsch.”
Borsch has many traditions, which can be split up into a few different regions.
Traditionally in the west of Ukraine, a landscape made up largely of forest, mushrooms play a central role in borsch.
Meanwhile, borsch with fish traditionally comes from the south of Ukraine, which is home to the Black and Azov Sea.
There are other traditions which belong to no particular region, like adding sauerkraut (sour cabbage), pickled tomatoes, honey, jam, or kvass, a delicious Ukrainian fermented drink.
When Yevhen visited the villages he found that every family had its own unique recipe for borsch.
“If I am from the west of Ukraine and I like mushrooms in my borsch, but my wife likes sour tomatoes, when we get married we will make our own borsch recipe, which has both mushrooms and sour tomatoes,” he explained.
If you go 400 years back into the past you will realize that very few of the ingredients used in borsch are similar to the ones used today.
As the world changes, recipes for food have to change too, Yevhen explained.
[Ed note: Tim’s Cantonese grandmother makes a form of tomato-based borsch that is popular in Hong Kong]
“Borsch, it’s an idea… maybe in the future, in 100 years, it will be very hot outside and there won’t be any beetroot. But there will be avocados or maybe passionfruit and we will put everything in the water and we will boil it and call it borsch,” Yevhen said.
“We don't care about what is inside. We care that it's our way of living. It's our, I don't know, our world,” Yevhen concludes.
After inviting me into his restaurant kitchen, Yevhen explained his recipe for borsch, which he spent two years perfecting.
I was surprised he agreed to share such a special recipe with me.
Secret recipes are just ego, he added as he handed me a hair net.
Yevhen Klopotento cooks borsh:
But all of Yevhen’s stories make me wonder: After years of eating, researching, making, talking and thinking about borsch, wasn’t Yevhen sick of it?
“You would think I would be, wouldn't you? But no, in fact, since we’ve talked about it so much today, I think I will have it for dinner tonight,” he answered.
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NEWS OF THE DAY:
Good morning to readers; Kyiv remains in Ukrainian hands.
RUSSIA TO CONSCRIPT NEARLY 150K FOR THE WAR: Putin has signed a decree on autumn conscription - 133,000 people will be called up for military service from 1 October to 31 December. These will be Russian citizens between the ages of 18 and 30 who are not in the reserves. British intelligence suggests that the recruits will be forced to sign contracts after their service to send them to war against Ukraine.
POLAND CALLS FOR CHINA TO STEP IN: Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski called on China to intervene in the war, arguing that they had also been "victims of unequal treaties, including by Russia." He told The Washington Post that he would be speaking to the Chinese foreign minister about this.
“Putin would not be able to prosecute this war without components and material from China. So China could shut down this war. And it should,” he said.
…HUNGARY AGREES: PM Viktor Orban tried to rally China and Brazil at the United Nations, urging them to organize a peace summit between Russia and Ukraine, according to EuroNews. "The dying must stop," he said. But Ukraine and its government have viewed Orban's diplomacy with skepticism and suspicion, given the Hungarian leader's cozy relationship with Putin.
PANEL CALLS FOR RECOGNITION OF RUSSIA AS PERMANENT SECURITY THREAT: The Helsinki Commission, an independent U.S. agency, is urging the government to abandon the Cold War status quo in its relations with Russia and call Moscow a permanent threat to global security, reports The Hill.
The report argues that Washington should rethink its approach to Russia, as it has done to China in recent years, and allocate resources accordingly. The commission also called for massive military and humanitarian aid to Kyiv and allowing the Ukrainian armed forces to strike deep into Russia with US-supplied weapons.
WAR KEEPING RUSSIAN ECONOMY ABOVE WATER: The war against Ukraine may be the only thing keeping Russia's economy afloat and preventing it from falling into an immediate recession, writes Business Insider.
Jay Zagorski, an economist at Boston University's Questrom School of Business, told the publication that Russia's economy is currently propped up by its huge military budget, but that this is only a temporary solution to Moscow's economic problems, which include budget/currency problems and spiralling inflation. Russia will spend 13.2 trillion roubles on the defence budget next year.
Dog of War
Today's Dog of War is Winston, who the Counteroffensive Pro team saw in a bar after the IT Arena conference in Lviv. Read our coverage of the Ukrainian defense tech space here!
Stay safe out there.
Best,
Myroslava
Loved reading this! And yep, making borscht tonight.
I’ve now tasted so many borsch recipes from all parts of Ukraine - my Kherson friend uses fish and hers is much more sour with fermented tomato and cabbage, not so much beetroot. I enjoyed Yevhen’s with the sour cream inside the beetroot on the side! And one of my army chef friends made me one so good, I asked for the recipe. ‘There’s no recipe’ he said. ‘We just know how it should taste’…