Russian Meat and Winter Vegetable Soup

Alla Zagoruyko taught me how to make this authentic Russian soup in her daughter's Maine kitchen. Alla worked as an engineer and remembers cooking this big pot of soup at night so her family would have it on hand for the next couple days. It tastes best a day after cooking.

See how to do it

Thank you Tiffany Converse Photography

Print the Recipe

Russian Meat and Winter Vegetable Soup

Recipe 1: Borsht With Beets (From Tver)

Makes a big pot to feed a family, and is best the day after making it.
Cooking time: about 1 ½ hours

1.25 lbs pounds London broil (or any meat, really)
3 garlic cloves, peeled
1 carrot, peeled
½ onion, peeled
3 potatoes
1 Tbsp olive oil
4 beets
¾ small cabbage
2 tsp kosher salt (to taste)
2 bay leaves

1. Cut the London broil (or any meat) in half. Put it in a large soup pot, filled a couple inches from the top with water, and bring to a simmer. Slice half the carrot into thin rounds, add them to the soup, and cut the other half into quarters lengthwise, and then across to make 1/4'” dice. Dice onion. Skim off and discard any foam that appears at the top of the soup. Add to the broth: one potato, peeled and quartered and two beets, peeled quartered.

2. In a small sauté pan on medium with 1 tablespoon olive oil, start sautéing diced carrots and onions. Peel remaining two beets and grate on a box grater. Add the sautéed carrots and onion to soup, along with the salt and bay leaves.

3. Start sautéing shredded beets in a small saute pan on medium until their color deepens slightly but they still have a mild crunch. Slice cabbage finely and add to soup. Peel and slice remaining two potatoes into flat rectangular slices and add to soup. Take quartered beets out of the soup once they’re cooked and discard. Take out the quartered potato, mash with a fork in a bowl, and return to the soup. Let soup simmer until cabbage is cooked. Add minced garlic and sautéed shredded beets last and turn off heat immediately after. Take meat out of soup, cut up into bite-sized pieces and return to pot. Let soup rest on stovetop for 1 hr. and then refrigerate until next day.

Serve warm with sour cream, chopped fresh parsley and dill, paprika, celery, “whatever you like,” and bread.

“When you have a hangover, this is the best medicine for it.” It’s typically served on New Year’s Day. -- Yulia Converse

****

Recipe 2: Borscht With No Beets (From Volgograd)

4 ½ quarts water
1 ½ medium carrots, cleaned
3 bay leaves
1 onion, cut in half
¾ pound pork (with bone and a lot of fat) cut into 6 large pieces
2/3 Tbsp Kosher salt
4 medium potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2” cubes
½ head cabbage, sliced thinly
2 Tbsp oil (she uses olive, but in Russia, they’d use sunflower)
½ yellow onion large dice
2 medium carrots, peeled and cut into ¼” rounds
2 small cloves of garlic, quartered lengthwise
2 medium tomatoes, large dice
2 tbsp tomato paste, mixed with 2 c water

Bring the first six ingredients to a boil and skim foam off top. Turn down and simmer for 1 hr and 45 min. Discard the carrots and onion halves with a slotted spoon. Add 1 quart of water to pot. Turn up heat to bring back to boil. In a separate large sauté pan, sauté onion, carrots, and garlic in oil until soft and caramelized, about twenty minutes. Add tomatoes, tomato paste and water and simmer for another twenty. Meanwhile, add potatoes to boiling broth, and bring to a boil again, add cabbage, return to boil, and turn off heat. Mix the carrot and tomato sauté into the soup. Salt and pepper to taste. Serve with sour cream, and raw-garlic-rubbed bread (scuff up the end of a garlic clove with a paring knife, and rub it all over crust).

The Story

Cooking with Two Russians

A day of authenticity, gross assumption and great soup.

By Lindsay Sterling

Yulia Converse welcomed me into her kitchen in Maine to learn from her mother, Alla Zagoruyko, how to make authentic Russian borsht. As you may remember I learned a version of borsht without beets from another Russian a couple months ago. That authentic borsht could have no beets had really thrown me. Turns out, it threw Yulia and her mother as well. Alla simmered beets in her broth, and added sauted shredded beets at the end. The difference just goes to show that the very idea of a food and of a people becomes skewed when it lands in a different country.

My idea of a Russian before hanging out with one was a weathered country person turning back from a field of snow into a hovel for another shot of vodka. What’s worse, I don’t even know what movie that’s from. Yulia and Alla helped conjure a more accurate picture. The two of them were city people from Tver, between Moscow and St. Petersburg. They had lived in apartment buildings like most other Russians in cities. Yulia was an interior designer. Her mother, Alla, had not been a housewife. (I’d assumed unwittingly that Russian women of her generation were less liberated in the workplace than American women. What did I know?) Alla had been an engineer, specializing in creating accurate estimates for general contractors. She remembered coming home from work and cooking a big pot of borsht among other things long after the kids fell asleep, for her family to have on hand the rest of the week.

Even Yulia’s husband, an American who’d been living with Yulia in Russia for over a decade and was a translator, made a little misjudgment about what being a Russian designer meant. Yulia corrected, “Russian designers don’t really do ‘Russian design.’” Her style was international, metropolitan, modern. In her own kitchen-living-dining area, the stunning table and chairs, all painted bright red with gold and black flowers, were from India. A cutting board was decorated with a Russian folk pattern. I assumed the apron Alla was wearing, red-and-white-checkered fabric with white embroidery on the front, was from Russia, too, but it was handmade by a Cherokee woman, Yulia’s mother-in-law, as a gift on Alla’s first visit to the United States. The bowls the soup was served in were Chinese.

So, if my impression of Russians had been so skewed, what might Russians think of Americans? “Before Perestroika,” Yulia explained, “we lived in our own juice. It was hard to find international books, clothes, music. After Perestroika, we ate Snickers bars.” Lest any Russians out there think I'm a Snickers bar eater, actually, the only candy I really eat is dark chocolate. This phenomenon of a singular thing misrepresenting the whole is slightly annoying, so if I may, after seeing to two authentic ways to make Russian borsht, I’d like to revise its definition in the American mind. From now on folks, borsht isn’t beet soup; it’s meat soup with winter vegetables in broth. The cooks of the beet and beet-less versions both said the best borsht was “soo titch ney ya,” or, as its written on fine menus there, sytochnye: best the next day. Turns out if you’re a pot of borsht, living in your own juice for a while is a good thing.

IIK New Recipe of the Month

Hi folks. I pass along the IIK New Recipe of the Month to friends via email. That way they actually cook this stuff as opposed to gawking at fancy food magazines or watching the food network and then eating crap. Something about email is actionable. Just print it and go. Cooking an immigrant's favorite food is an easy, affordable shot of adventure in life -- like travel, without the plane tickets. Email me at lindsay@lindsaysterling.com if you want in.