borscht

(AMAMOS a Aleksandar Hemon).


An eventful century or so ago, my paternal ancestors left what was then Galicia, the easternmost province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now western Ukraine), and settled in Bosnia, which had recently been annexed to the Hapsburg domain. My peasant forebears brought with them a few beehives, an iron plow, and a recipe for perfect borscht, a dish that was, I believe, previously unknown in that part of the world.

There was no written document, of course; they carried the recipe within themselves, like a song that you learn by singing it. In the summers of my childhood, which I spent at my grandparents' house in the countryside in northwest Bosnia, my grandmother and a committee of aunts (sometimes actually singing a song) would start early in the morning, chopping various vegetables, beets included, then boiling them mercilessly on a woodstove in the infernally hot kitchen. The Hemon borscht contained whatever was available in the garden at the time - onions, cabbage, peppers, pole and other beans, even potatoes - plus at least one kind of meat (though never, for some reason, chicken), all of which was purpled beyond recognition by the beets. I've discovered that no one in my family knows exactly what should go into borscht, though there is a consensus that it must contain beets, dill, and vinegar. The amounts and the proportions change with the cook, just as a song changes with the singer. As far as I can tell, it never bothered any Hemon that there was always at least one mystery ingredient (carrots? turnips? peas?). Whatever the variation, no bad borscht was produced. The vinegary tartness, so refreshing in the summer; the crunchy beet cubes (the beets go in last); the luck-of-the-spoon-draw combination of ingredients, providing new shades of flavor with each slurp - eating borscht was always eventful, never boring.

I can still see my grandmother, the senior borscht cook, with an enormous, steaming pot in her hands, wobbling from the kitchen out to the yard, sweat drops sliding off her forehead and into the borscht, for that special final touch. She'd deposit the pot on a long wooden table, where the Hemon tribe was waiting, aflutter with hunger. Then the soup would be ladled out, with at least one piece of meat distributed to each mismatched bowl. There were often so many of us that we had to eat in shifts; one summer, my sister and I counted forty-seven people at my grandparents' for lunch, most of them related to us. Among the Hemons, the intensity of the slurping is proportional to the enjoyment of the food, and the borscht that day yielded a symphony.

Festive though it may have been, our family lunch was not a ceremonious meal. It was meant to provide nourishment and reprieve for those who had worked the fields in the sun all morning and would return to work until sunset. Thus, whatever we ate had to be simple and abundant, and the Hemon borscht fit those requirements perfectly. Like all the dishes that are traditional in my family - pierogi, or varenyky, which are really potato ravioli; steranka, dough boiled in milk, the very mention of which brings tears to my father's eyes - borscht is poor people's food. It was designed (if indeed it was designed, rather than just randomly concocted) not to delight the sophisticated senses but to insure survival. You do not meet a friend over borscht, let alone share it with a date by romantic candlelight, even if you are able to suppress the urge to slurp. There is no wine that goes with borscht. The perfect borscht is a utopian dish: ideally, it contains everything; it is produced and consumed collectively; and it can be refrigerated and reheated in perpetuity, always better the next day. The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.

In the early days after I came to Chicago, I lived alone and often struggled to reproduce the pleasures of my previous life. Nostalgically, I sought decent - I didn't expect good - borscht. But what I found at Ukrainian restaurants or in supermarkets with ethnic-food shelves was merely thin beet soup, so I was forced to try to reconstruct the family borscht from my addled memory. I'd make a pot for myself and live on it for a week or two. But what I made in this land of sad abundance was never like what I remembered. It was always missing at least one ingredient, not including the mystery one. More important, there is nothing more pathetic as solitary borscht. The crucial ingredient of a perfect borscht is a large, hungry family, surviving together.

Aleksandar Hemon, The New Yorker, November 22, 2010.