Precursors Borscht derives from a soup originally made by the
Slavs from
common hogweed ('''', also known as cow parsnip), which gave the dish its
Slavic name. Growing commonly in damp meadows throughout the north temperate zone, hogweed was used not only as fodder (as its English names suggest), but also for human consumption—from Eastern Europe to Siberia, to northwestern North America. The Slavs collected hogweed in May and used its roots for stewing with meat. As for the stems, leaves, and
umbels; these would be chopped, covered with water and left in a warm place to ferment. After a few days,
lactic and
alcoholic fermentation produced a mixture described as "something between
beer and sauerkraut". The said soup—with aforementioned fermented hogweed concoction used—was characterized by a mouth-puckering amount of sourness in its taste, while its smell was described as pungent As the Polish
ethnographer wrote in 1830, "Poles have been always partial to tart dishes, which are somewhat peculiar to their homeland and vital to their health."
Simon Syrenius (), a 17th century Polish botanist, described "our Polish hogweed" as a vegetable that was well known throughout Poland,
Ruthenia,
Lithuania and
Samogitia (that is, most of the northern part of Eastern Europe), typically used for cooking a "tasty and graceful soup" with
capon stock, eggs, sour cream and
millet. More interested in the plant's medicinal properties than its culinary use, he also recommended pickled hogweed juice as a cure for fever or hangover. One of the earliest possible mentions of borscht as a soup is found in the diary of German merchant Martin Gruneweg, who visited
Kyiv in 1584. After Gruneweg reached river
Borshchahivka in Kyiv's vicinity on 17 October 1584, he wrote down a local legend saying that the river was so named because there was a borscht market. However, he doubted the story noting that "
Ruthenians buy borscht rarely or never, because everyone cooks their own at home as it's their staple food and drink". Another early written reference to the Slavic hogweed soup can be found in ''
(Domestic Order''), a 16th century Russian compendium of moral rules and homemaking advice. It recommends growing the plant "by the fence, around the whole garden, where the nettle grows", to cook a soup of it in springtime and reminds the reader to, "for the Lord's sake, share it with those in need". Hogweed borscht was mostly a poor man's food. The soup's humble beginnings are still reflected in Polish fixed expressions, where "cheap like borscht" is the equivalent of "dirt cheap" (also attested as a
calque in Yiddish and
Canadian English), whereas adding "two mushrooms into borscht" is synonymous with excess. For the professors of the
University of Kraków, who led a monastic way of life in the 17th century, hogweed borscht was a fasting dish which they ate regularly from Lent till
Rogation days. It was uncommon on the royal table, although according to the 16th century Polish botanist
Marcin of Urzędów—citing , a court physician to the
Jagiellonian kings of Hungary—the Polish-born King
Vladislaus II used to have a Polish hogweed-based dish prepared for him at his court in
Buda.
Diversification With time, other ingredients were added to the soup, eventually replacing hogweed altogether, and the names '
or ' became generic terms for any sour-tasting soup. In 19th century rural Poland, this term included soups made from
barberries,
currants,
gooseberries,
cranberries, celery or
plums. When describing the uses of common hogweed,
John Gerard, a 17th century English botanist, observed that "the people of [Poland] and Lithuania [used] to make [a] drink with the decoction of this herb and
leaven or some other thing made of
meal, which is used instead of beer and other ordinary drink". It may suggest that hogweed soup was on some occasions combined with a fermented mixture of water and
barley flour, oatmeal or rye flour. Such soured, gelatinous flour-and-water mixture, originally known as
kissel (from the Proto-Slavic root
*kyslŭ, 'sour') had been already mentioned in
The Tale of Bygone Years, a 12th century chronicle of
Kievan Rus', and continued to be a staple of Ukrainian and Russian cooking until the middle of the 19th century. In Poland, a soup based on diluted kissel became known as either '
(from Middle High German ', 'sour') or '
and later—to distinguish it from the red beetroot borscht—as ', 'white borscht'. The earliest known Polish recipes for borscht, written by chefs catering to Polish
magnates (aristocrats), are from the late 17th century. , head chef to Prince , included several borscht recipes in his ''
(A Collection of Dishes
), the first cookbook published originally in Polish, in 1682. They include such sour soups as lemon borscht and "royal borscht", the latter made from assorted dried, smoked or fresh fish and fermented rye bran. A manuscript recipe collection from the family court, dating back to , contains an instruction for making hogweed borscht mixed with poppy seeds or ground almonds. As this was a Lenten dish, it was garnished, in a fashion typical of Baroque cuisine, with mock eggs made from finely chopped pike that was partly dyed with saffron and formed into oval balls. An alternative recipe for the almond borscht replaced pickled hogweed with vinegar.. In the 18th century, borscht made from fermented beetroot appeared on tables, and it was this version that gained the most popularity. It was served at the famous Thursday dinners of King Stanisław August Poniatowski, as well as during Easter breakfast at the Czartoryski princes home. In the 18th century, the term borscht man
referred to someone clumsy and awkward. However, thanks to culinary experiments and increasingly sophisticated recipes, borscht gained recognition and became a permanent part of Polish tradition. The 19th-century historian Cezary Biernacki wrote: Borscht was and is the most commonplace, and with the addition of spices, the most accurate, truly Polish soup, received with great taste, indeed, and respect.'' The 19th century was a turning point; it was then that red borscht with dumplings began to appear on Christmas Eve tables. attributed as "borscht" may be indistinguishable from the Russian
shchi. Borscht also evolved into a variety of sour soups to the east of Poland. Examples include onion borscht, a recipe for which was included in a 1905 Russian cookbook, and sorrel-based green borscht, which is still a popular summer soup in Ukraine and Russia.
A Gift to Young Housewives by
Elena Molokhovets, the best-selling Russian cookbook of the 19th century, first published in 1861, contains nine recipes for borscht, some of which are based on
kvass, a traditional Slavic
fermented beverage made from rye bread. Kvass-based variants were also known in Ukraine at that time; some of them were types of green borscht, while others were similar to the Russian ''''. Before the advent of beet-based borscht, cabbage borscht was of particular importance. Made from either fresh cabbage or sauerkraut, it could be indistinguishable from the Russian
shchi. Indeed, the mid-19th century
Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language defines '''' as sour beet or "a kind of shchi" with sour beet base. The significance of cabbage as an essential ingredient of borscht is manifest in the Ukrainian proverb, "without bread, it's no lunch; without cabbage, it's no borscht."
Novel ingredients: beets, tomatoes and potatoes Beet (''''), a plant native to the
Mediterranean Basin, was already grown in antiquity. Only the leaves were of culinary use, as the tapered, tough, whitish and bitter-tasting root was considered unfit for human consumption. It is probably that beet greens were used in variants of green borscht long before the invention of the beetroot-based red borscht. Beet
varieties with round, red, sweet
taproots, known as beetroots, were not reliably reported until the 12th century and did not spread to Eastern Europe before the 16th century. , a
Polish Renaissance poet and moralist, included the earliest known Polish recipe for pickled beetroots in his 1568 book,
Life of an Honest Man. It would later evolve into '
, or ', a beet-and-horseradish relish popular in Polish and Jewish cuisines. also recommended the "very tasty brine" left over from beetroot pickling, which was an early version of beet sour. The sour found some applications in Polish folk medicine as a cure for hangover and—mixed with honey—as a sore throat remedy. It may never be known who first thought of using beet sour to flavor borscht, which also gave the soup its now-familiar red color. One of the earliest mentions of borscht with pickled beets comes from Russian ethnographer Andrey Meyer, who wrote in his 1781 book that people in Ukraine make fermented red beets with
Acanthus, which they in turn use to cook their borscht. The book "Description of the Kharkiv Governorate" of 1785, which describes the food culture of the Ukrainians, says that borscht was the most consumed food, cooked from beets and cabbage with various other herbal spices and millet, on sour kvass; it was always made with pork lard or beef lard, on holidays with lamb or poultry, and sometimes with game. 's Polish-German dictionary published in 1806 was the first to define '''' as a tart soup made from pickled beetroots. The fact that certain 19th century Russian and Polish cookbooks, such as
Handbook of the Experienced Russian Housewife (1842) by and
The Lithuanian Cook (1854) by , refer to beetroot-based borscht as "Little Russian borscht" (where "
Little Russian" is a term used at the time for ethnic
Ukrainians under
imperial Russian rule) suggests that this innovation took place in what is now Ukraine, whose soils and climate are particularly well suited to beet cultivation. Ukrainian legends, probably of 19th century origin, attribute the invention of beetroot borscht either to
Zaporozhian Cossacks, serving in the Polish army, on their way to break the
siege of Vienna in 1683, or to
Don Cossacks, serving in the Russian army, while
laying siege to Azov in 1695. Spanish
conquistadors brought potatoes and tomatoes from the Americas to Europe in the 16th century, but these vegetables only became commonly grown and consumed in Eastern Europe in the 19th century. Eventually, both became staples of
peasant diet and essential ingredients of Ukrainian and Russian borscht. Potatoes replaced turnips in borscht recipes, and tomatoes—fresh, canned or paste—took over from beet sour as the source of tartness. The turnip is rarely found in modern recipes, and even then, together with potatoes. In Ukraine, beet sour and tomatoes were both used for some time until the latter ultimately prevailed during the last third of the 19th century.
Haute cuisine In Ukraine borshch was popularized as a national dish by the 19th century, when many recipes for cooking borshch had become known, some of which would contain more than 20 ingredients. Among the rich it was not unusual to have several varieties of the dish during one meal. One recipe preserved from that time includes ingredients such as
cardamom,
eggs,
mushrooms and
cherry. The earliest waves of migration, however, occurred at a time when cabbage-based borscht was still the dominant variant of the soup in at least parts of Russia. The Mennonites, who began arriving in Canada and the United States from Russia's
Volga region in the 1870s, still eschew beetroots in their borscht; instead, Mennonite varieties include '
(with cabbage or sauerkraut) and ' (sorrel-based "summer borscht"). According to the
Jewish Encyclopedia published in 1906, cabbage-based
kraut borscht was also more popular than the beet-based variant in
American Jewish cuisine at the time. Subsequent Jewish immigration helped popularize the red borscht in America. In the 1930s, when most American hotels refused to accept Jewish guests due to widespread
anti-Semitism,
New York Jews began flocking to Jewish-owned resorts in the
Catskill Mountains for their summer vacations. The area grew into a major center of Jewish entertainment, with restaurants offering
all-you-can-eat Ashkenazi Jewish fare, including copious amounts of borscht.
Grossinger's, one of the largest resorts, served borscht throughout the day, every day of the year. The region became known, initially in derision, as the "
Borscht Belt", reinforcing the popular association between borscht and American Jewish culture. As most visitors arrived in the summertime, the borscht was typically served cold. Marc Gold was one of its largest suppliers, producing 1,750
short tons (1,590
tonnes) a year in his business's heyday. Gold's borscht consists of
puréed beetroots seasoned with sugar, salt and citric acid; it is usually blended with sour cream and served as a refreshing beverage, more aptly described as a "beet
smoothie". Such type of "purplish, watery broth" is, according to Nikolai Burlakoff, author of
The World of Russian Borsch, "associated in America with borsch, in general, and Jewish borsch in particular."
Borscht in the USSR In the
Soviet Union, borscht was one of the most popular everyday dishes. It was described in 2008 by journalist
James Meek as "the common denominator of the
Soviet kitchen, the dish that tied together ... the high table of
the Kremlin and the meanest canteen in the boondocks of the
Urals, ... the beetroot soup that pumped like the main artery through the kitchens of the
east Slav lands." Among Soviet leaders, the Ukrainian-born
Leonid Brezhnev was especially partial to borscht, which his wife continued to personally cook for him even after they had moved into the Kremlin. The soup has even played a role in the
Soviet space program. In March 1961, as part of a communications equipment test, a pre-recorded recipe for borscht was broadcast from the
Korabl-Sputnik 4 spacecraft. The craft, carrying animals and
a mannequin, had been launched into
low Earth orbit in preparation for crewed space flights. All ingredients for the space borscht (which include beef, beetroots, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, onions, parsley root, and tomato paste) were cooked separately, then combined one by one in strictly controlled order,
sterilized, packed into tubes, sealed airtight and
autoclaved. In the 1970s, the tubes were replaced with packages of rehydratable
freeze-dried borscht with regular-size bits of cooked vegetables. An article on borscht in the Soviet-era book
Entsyclopedia Domashnego Hozyaystva () suggests to make a soup with beets, other vegetables, and tomato purée as a "borscht" in general. Its recipe of meat borscht also suggests adding vinegar to one's taste. == In culture ==