Borsch is a soup like no other: A chef travels across Ukraine to sample dozens of distinctive recipes
‘This is the meal Ukrainians and Ukraine cannot exist without.’
Almost every country has a signature dish anchored deep in its culture by way of ingredients that express its land, climate and character. In Ukraine, that dish is borsch: a sweet and sour beet soup with seemingly endless variations — all intimately tied to place.
Ievgen Klopotenko, a renowned Kyiv-based chef, is on a mission to tell the world that Ukraine's heart beats for beets. In the documentary Borsch: The Secret Ingredient, Klopotenko embarks on a quest to sample variations of the iconic soup throughout his country. "This is the meal Ukrainians and Ukraine cannot exist without," Klopotenko says in Ukrainian in the film.
In April 2022, in the midst of the war following Russia's February invasion of Ukraine, UNESCO added Ukrainian borsch-cooking to its List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. The Guardian noted that this came after a years-long push for recognition by Klopotenko.
"Whether as part of a wedding meal, the focus of food-related competitions or as a driver of tourism, borscht is considered part of the fabric of Ukrainian society, cultural heritage, identity and tradition," UNESCO said in a statement.
Each variation of borsch reveals something about the people who make it
The documentary begins by tracing borsch's humble origins. According to the film, the dish started as a vegetarian soup; hundreds of years ago, 80 per cent of Ukrainians ate little to no meat because it was so expensive. Klopotenko's travels through Ukraine show how adding various meats and their rich broths eventually became the norm.
The chef kicks off his tasty trek in the Carpathian Mountains, where he meets Yanko Derevlyanyi, a wood artist who has spent 45 years welcoming tourists to his forest hut and treating them to borsch.
His recipe is ancient: first, he fries the vegetables in oil over an open fire, which adds smoky depth, then he adds water to the cauldron along with ingredients like wild herbs, cabbage and mushrooms, which add extra earthiness. "Fire, vegetables and herbs … I think this is how it used to be 500 years ago," says Klopotenko.
Each new variation of the soup reveals something about the people simmering it. In the town of Vylkove, many people live along waterways that connect to the Danube. Klopotenko learns that locals not only use the river's crucian carp in their borsch but its water too, and joins a pair of sisters as they cook their delicate soup outdoors using a handmade reed and clay oven.
The chef travels to Kyiv to meet a Crimean Tatar family who incorporate tender lamb broth and coriander, then to Zabolot' on the Belarusian border where sauerkraut and forest honey take the brothy dive. In the western city of Uzhhorod, the soup adopts Hungarian flavours thanks to smoked sausage and paprika.
Klopotenko even visits Chernobyl's exclusion zone, where borsch based on a rigid 1987 Soviet-era recipe — with butter for extra calories — is served in the lunchroom to people still working on the power plant's decommissioning.
100 varieties of borsch — all 'authentic'
Throughout the centuries, borsch has become intrinsically linked to Ukrainian customs and life rites, with bowls of the hearty stuff showing up on all sorts of tables, from weddings to funerals.
"I already know 100 varieties of borsch as of today. All are authentic," says ethnographer Olena Shcherban, who lives according to ancient Ukrainian traditions, wears traditional clothes and makes borsch in a clay pot in the oven.
Shcherban adds beet kvass — a fermented drink made with red and white beets, horseradish and water — to her recipe for a sweet and sour kick.
A call to cook borsch
Of course, borsch is not only found in Ukraine. When I first tried the soup, I was sitting with my mother, who is of Polish-Jewish descent, at a now-closed restaurant on Montreal's Prince-Arthur Street called Mazurka. It was the type of place where you might want to wait out a snowstorm, with kitschy decor and huge helpings of meaty, stick-to-your-ribs food.
When I spoke to my mom about borsch recently though, she recalled yet another variation that speaks to its versatility. Her own mother, whose parents moved to Canada from Warsaw between the World Wars, would serve the soup cold as an antidote to humid heat on summer days of her childhood.
At the end of the documentary, Klopotenko makes a version of borsch using some of the tricks and ingredients he's gleaned far and wide in his homeland.
He includes staple red beets, honeycomb, paprika, mushrooms, tomato brine, prunes, lamb fat, a sour milk product from the Carpathian Mountains called guslyanka, and many more ingredients that may never have been combined in this exact way. His inventive process feels like a tantalizing call to viewers to get cooking.
A few days after watching the film, I set out to make my own borsch by diving into my winter CSA basket, chock full of the root veggies this tangy and slightly sweet soup begs for.
I took cues from the chef, mixing in ingredients I had on hand too: deep red beets, carrots, the turnips I otherwise neglect, paprika for a bit of smokiness, a splash of local apple cider vinegar, lots of garlic from a farmer friend, some leftover veal stock I wanted to use up and sauerkraut laced with seaweed from the St. Lawrence River. Then I topped the bowls with a healthy dollop of sour cream and fresh dill.
The result was undeniably borsch, but it was one that tasted of my own time and place — a cold winter day in Quebec.
Travelling from mountain shacks to fine dining urban restaurants, rustic artists' homes and military front lines, Klopotenko proves that borsch is a Ukrainian life force meant to be shared rather than kept secret. And in celebrating its countless iterations and making his own variation on the theme, he shows how even a new hodgepodge packed with flavourful creativity can be deeply authentic.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
