“Victory in the borscht war is ours,” Ukraine’s Culture Minister Oleksandr Tkachenko said on Telegram…
— from the South China Morning Post, July 2, 2022
I hear things are not going so well for the Ukrainian army.
For the women in Ukrainian kitchens, maybe better?
But not so good for the Russian housewives, if they care about culinary heritage.
This war — the borscht war — is personal, for me, because my ex-wife Darlene got all the cookbooks in the divorce, including the one that featured our favorite borscht recipe. A delicious beet soup.
Since we’re speaking frankly, I grew up hating beets… right up until Darlene made her first batch of borscht. Maybe it was the sour cream that did the trick? I’ve always been a sucker for sour cream.
Be that as it may, borscht quickly became a family tradition. Even the kids liked it. And we’re talking about kids who whined unmercifully whenever a vegetable of any type appeared at the dinner table. Except French fries, of course. (Are French fries even a vegetable? The experts disagree.)
Anyway, I haven’t had a decent bowl of borscht since the divorce. I had to borrow this photo, below, from a recipe website. It hurts, just looking at it.
And now, I see where the Ukrainians and the Russians are fighting over this same soup.
I had wondered what the war was all about. The mainstream media made it sound like it had something to do with NATO membership. Apparently not.
As the story gets told, a Ukrainian chef named Ievgen Klopotenko was fed up (if I may use that term) with the fact that restaurants all around the world were referring to borscht as “Russian soup”.
Borscht is not Russian soup. (What was a relief to find that out.) After a thorough investigation, the experts at UNESCO — the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — have determined that borscht was invented and perfected in Ukraine, and the recipe was later stolen by (or sold to?) Russian housewives, who then started claiming cultural rights.
The UN cultural agency “on Friday inscribed the culture surrounding beetroot soup, known as ‘borscht’ in Ukraine, on its list of endangered cultural heritage, a recognition sought urgently by Kviv after its invasion by neighboring Russia.” According to the Agence France-Presse (AFP).
“We had hundreds of pages of proof that borscht cooking culture is actually Ukrainian, and the whole engine of Russian propaganda was against us,” Klopotenko stated in a social media post.
“Victory in the borscht war is ours,” Ukraine’s Culture Minister Oleksandr Tkachenko said on Telegram, adding that Ukraine “will win both in the war of borscht and in this war”.
Turns out, all of those crates marked “Military Equipment”, being smuggled into Ukraine by the NATO nations? They’re actually full of beets.
The real weapons of war.
While searching for photos to illustrate this column, I stumbled upon some disturbing websites that offer Polish borscht recipes, and even a few German borscht recipes.
Obviously, we’re in danger of seeing this nasty war spread across much of Europe.
That got me thinking about our neighbors here in the Western Hemisphere. In particular, about tortilla soup.
Who really invented tortilla soup? I mean, really.
Theoretically, could the U.S. and Mexico also end up in a war?
You might be tempted to laugh at that suggestion, thinking that the U.S. and Mexico have the kind of relationship where it’s perfectly acceptable for everyone to eat the tortilla soup, without fighting about it.
But please recall, that the U.S. and Mexico once got into a war over the ownership of Texas, long before anyone had discovered oil there. What was that war over? 268,596 square miles of sagebrush?