Ukraine in a dish

The borscht battles are like the hummus hostilities and the Jollof Rice jousts

PHOTO BY ANSHU A ON UNSPLASH

Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, most people would have said that borscht, the distinctively coloured beetroot soup, is Polish or Russian. Hardly anyone would have decisively identified borscht as Ukrainian.

A “babble” of Eastern European recipes makes it “difficult to say which dish belongs where”. — Lesley Chamberlain, former Reuters correspondent in Moscow, who wrote two books on the food of the region

In Felicity Cloake’s authoritative Guardian blog from April 2011, ‘How to cook perfect borscht’, she takes a bit of time to even mention Ukraine. When she does it’s to cite Lesley Chamberlain, a former Reuters correspondent in Moscow, who compiled a cookbook with a “modern Polish” recipe for borscht from Lwów or Lviv.

And slightly later, Ms Cloake quotes Lindsay Bareham’s book, ‘A Celebration of Soup’, which “claims that borscht is ‘originally from the Ukraine’.” Ms Cloake indicates that she thinks nothing of this “claim” by citing Lesley Chamberlain a…