Boil 5 medium-sized beets until tender; then chop and add to a highly seasoned chicken broth. Add the juice of 1 lemon, some cinnamon and nutmeg; let boil fifteen minutes. Then add 1 glass of red wine, mixed with a teaspoonful of brown sugar. Let boil a few minutes longer and serve with fried croutons.
The instructions assume you already have a pot of well-seasoned chicken broth on the stove; everything else is seasoning and timing. Nothing here is difficult, but the original leaves the two most important quantities unstated.
- Broth quantityNo volume is given. Five medium beets suit about 6 cups (1.5 litres) of broth, which yields four to six servings as a first course. Use a strongly flavoured stock, since the beets, lemon and wine all pull against it.
- "1 glass of wine"In books of this period a wineglassful is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, a quarter cup, rather than a modern 6-8 oz pour; some sources run to twice that, so treat it as a small pour. A dry red is right; the teaspoon of brown sugar is there to round off the lemon, not to sweeten the soup.
- Cooking the beetsWhole medium beets take 40-60 minutes at a simmer, longer if large. Leave the skins and an inch of stem on while boiling so they do not bleed out, then slip the skins off and chop. Roasting them at 400F in foil gives a deeper flavour and works just as well here.
- Chop or grateChopped beets give a chunky soup. Coarsely grating them instead, as many Eastern European beet soups do, releases more colour into the broth and gives a deeper red.
- SpicingCinnamon and nutmeg are unmeasured and easy to overdo. Start with a pinch of each in 6 cups and taste after the fifteen-minute boil; they should read as warmth behind the beet, not as a spice note.
- Keep the boil gentleFifteen minutes at a hard boil will dull both the colour and the lemon. A steady simmer holds the brightness, and once the wine goes in two or three minutes is enough to cook off the raw edge.
- ServingThe fried croutons are the whole garnish as written; cubes of bread crisped in butter. A spoonful of sour cream stirred in at the table is the standard accompaniment and does no harm to the recipe's intent.
Nearly every cuisine from Poland east has a soured beet soup, and the family name most readers know is borscht not originally a beet dish at all: the word is generally traced to a Slavic name for hogweed, which was fermented for the sour broth that beets later replaced. What marks this version as a compiler's "Russian" recipe rather than a household one is the route it takes to sourness, using lemon juice and red wine where a Russian or Ukrainian cook would have reached for beet kvass, sour salt or brine, and the sweet-spice pairing of cinnamon and nutmeg, which belongs to the older European tradition of spicing broths. Day-a-year books like this one traded on their promise of a cure for menu fatigue, and their national dishes are typically translated into ingredients an ordinary grocer stocked hence chicken broth, a lemon and a glass of red wine standing in for a fermented base.