Borscht

The beet was Rasputin’s favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes. 

       -- Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

I was very glad that our friend Mark Muldoon was visiting us the day My Darling Boy, Sky Goodson, Pure O’ Heart, announced his Vegetarianism.  We were gathered around the dinner table, that sacred place, the heart of our home, where conversation and love were served up every evening with beef, fish, or chicken. We were eating beef borscht. The rest of us were happily slurping away, when Sky looked down at his spoon with concern; it was filled, as it would be, with beef and beet. He said, tentatively, “Mom, Dad if it is not too much trouble, I would like to become a vegetarian.”  My jaw dropped.

What would become of The Family Dinner!?!  

Happily, Mark, our dear and omnivorous friend who happens to be a great cook (and who can also whip up a good equation when you need one) filled the stunned silence with, “That’s Brilliant!!!! We will make a Veg Feast tomorrow to celebrate!”  That was the right response.

For the rest of his stay, Mark proceeded to cook for us one vegetarian adventure after another, easing our transition into this new world, leaving us with many excellent recipes to sustain us when he returned to his home to England.  He also pointed out some fine recipes in an excellent cookbook by Deborah Madison, that had been given to us by another friend, Susan Yewell, to get us through the lean times when Mark was far away. I realized I could cope with my young Veg among the Heathens, though it might take a village. Although the rest of us weren’t ready to completely convert, we were to able learn to expand our culinary horizons, eat less meat, haunt the farmers’ market for local-grown inspiration, and to try to support and respect Sky’s ethical decision. So we all try to live at least a little lighter on the Earth, even though my husband and I do continue to eat meat, we do so more sparingly.  When we do include meat in our dinner, I cook up in parallel a veg version; all the more left-overs for lunch boxes. Sky is a lad that admires efficiency and sustainability, and he is inspired by the oft-cited ratio: 5 times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through consuming grain directly. He makes a worthy point, and I’m grateful to have it brought to my attention (although I've learned to look at steaks with a whole new level of gratitude when Sky is away for the weekend).

But we were left with a problem.  We all deeply and seriously love borscht. Beef borscht. I tried a few times to find a veg version that we liked as much as our beef version. I failed. I had originally learned to make this soup from a Polish friend, Iwona Stroynowski, who announced "there are as many Borschts as there are Poles..."  She actually was the master of several Borschts, including one clear intense red fermented version she served at Christmas, that apparently took some months of preparation. The Christmas Borscht was beyond my meager skills or ambition level, but it was fine to sip; if one could drink the essence of rubies, or distillation of the deepest red of the sky at sunset, that would be Iwona's "Barszcz". 

I was armed with the knowledge that came with the recipe from Iwona: Borscht experimentation is in keeping with good Polish tradition.  Thus I felt free to try anything to adapt her beef Borscht, one of our favorite dinners, to Sky's new Declaration of Vegetarianism, and so to be consistent with the rights and responsibilities therein.  Red beans just didn’t cut it. Garbanzo? Right out.  Cabbage? Well, not horrible, but still... Happily, Mark returned to visit again, and again he saved the day: Shitake mushrooms.  A savory rich broth can be had, the mushrooms work well with dill, and the bits of chewy mushroom are a fine alternative to beef.

Beef (or not) Borscht

1 onion

2 cloves garlic

Splash olive oil

4 cups broth

1 lb stewing beef, chopped for soup, or else 10 dried shitake mushrooms for a veg version

2 large or 3 medium beets

3 red potatoes

3-4 carrots

1 celery heart, including leaves and stalks -- save the outer stalks for snacking later.

Fresh dill -- 1 package, reserving a few sprigs for garnish.

For the veg version -- 30 minutes ahead, pour a cup or two of boiling water over the mushrooms and let them soak.

Chop onions and garlic and cook in olive oil.

If you using beef, stir it in now, to brown the meat.

Veg version: add the 'shroom broth from the hydrating mushrooms + additional water. 

Heathen version: use beef broth. Either way you'll need 4-5 cups, and bring to a simmer.

Chop the other vegetables, add them to the pot, including the chopped re-hydrated mushrooms if you are using them. Cover and let them simmer about 40 minutes, until they are all tender, adding water as needed to maintain a good broth.

The final touch for either version is adding lots of chopped fresh dill to the pot, a good handful, and cooking the soup with the dill for a few more minutes until it wilts.

Serve in a bowl worthy of the glorious red of the beet, top with a dollop of sour cream and a sprig of dill.

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A tribute to the beet: The opening of Jitterbug Perfume, by Tom Robbins

The beet is the most intense of vegetables.



The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.



Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer.

You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip…

The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial’s plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.



The beet was Rasputin’s favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.



In Europe there is grown widely a large beet they call the mangel-wurzel. Perhaps it is mangel-wurzel that we see in Rasputin. Certainly there is mangel-wurzel in the music of Wagner, although it is another composer whose name begins, B-e-e-t—

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Beethoven cello sonata op.102 nr.1 in C major

Sébastien Singer, cello
Marc Pantillon, piano