In St. Petersburg, Russia, on a late November day, it gets dark quite early. I'd entered the State Hermitage Museum's staggeringly vast art collection (4 million artifacts! 20,000 paintings!) in sunshine, but when I emerged at 4 p.m., it was night.
Trudging forth, through the gray snow, I felt nearly as weary as Napoleon, dragging himself back to Paris from Russia in defeat. Feeling peckish, I decided on a simple bowl of borscht.
Little did I realize, however, that there's nothing simple about this most Russian of soups. In fact, no sooner did I place my order at Davidoff, the Astoria Hotel's elegant restaurant, than complexities began. "Would you like your borscht hot or cold?" the waiter asked.
Hmmm. To my inexperienced ear, this seemed a bit like inquiring if I preferred my ice cream chilled or at room temperature. "Hot," I said, and a few minutes later, a fragrant bowl was set before me. Here was a clear broth, as brilliantly reddish-purple as raspberry puree, in which floated a few vegetables, cut julienne-style. A smaller dish, set alongside my soup bowl, held a dollop of sour cream.
Sweet and sour, this was so precisely the picture of borscht I had in my mind, I couldn't imagine any other. This led me to wonder about what seemed the waiter's silly question. There's only one way to eat borscht, right?
Nyet!
"Sometimes I think there are a million versions of borscht," said Tatyana Malyutin, a native of Lvov, Ukraine, who lives in Reisterstown.
"It depends on where you are from, even what family you were born into, what type of borscht you cook. The recipe is so forgiving, you can do whatever comes into your head, as long as there are beets in there. Well, beets and garlic. Without garlic, there is no borscht."
"It is a very `home-cooking' kind of soup," said Helena Williams, chef and co-owner of Smedly's in Fells Point, whose family originally hails from Bialystok, Poland. "In this part of the world, it is a nothing-goes-to-waste society. You boil a ham, or sausage in water, and then make borscht with the leftover liquid. Traditionally, though, borscht has to include kvass. It's the sour part that makes borscht." (We'll get to a kvass controversy in a moment.)
In my week's vacation, split between St. Petersburg and Moscow, I furthermore learned that Russia's most famous soup isn't even Russian, but Ukrainian in origin. In Ukraine alone, well over a hundred varieties of borscht exist, with many more recipes in Poland, Belarus, Slovenia and Slovakia.
