Chop and fry all kinds of vegetables until tender. Make a highly-seasoned beef broth; add the fried vegetables, 2 boiled beets chopped fine, some chopped ham, ¼ teaspoonful of fennel seed, 2 sprigs of parsley chopped. Let boil well; then add 1 cup of hot cream and serve at once.
October 4 — No. 4
Russian
This is a loose American shorthand for borscht, written for cooks who were expected to know how much of everything to use. Almost every quantity is left to judgment, so treat it as a formula rather than a set of measurements.
- Add the cream off the boilThe hinge of the dish. Once the cream goes in, the soup should not return to a boil, since it may curdle against the acidity of the beets. Take the pot off the heat, stir the hot cream in, and serve immediately as directed.
- Working quantitiesFor a soup of this kind, figure roughly 2 quarts of beef broth, 4 to 5 cups of mixed chopped vegetables, 2 medium beets, and about a cup of diced ham. That yields six to eight servings, which the original does not state.
- "All kinds of vegetables"Probably the standard soup pot: onion, carrot, celery, cabbage, and perhaps potato or turnip, though the recipe names none of them. Frying them first in butter or rendered fat before the broth goes in builds sweetness.
- Boiled beetsCook the beets separately and add them chopped at the end, as written. Long boiling in the pot dulls their color to brown; adding them late, ideally with a spoonful of vinegar or lemon juice, keeps the soup red.
- "Let boil well"Ten to fifteen minutes is likely enough once the fried vegetables are tender; the recipe gives no time.
- Fennel seedA quarter teaspoon is the whole spicing here, and it is unusual for borscht, where dill is the more common note. Bruise the seed before it goes in, or substitute a tablespoon of chopped fresh dill for something closer to the Russian original.
- The creamThe book calls only for a cup of hot cream, without specifying sweet or soured; smetana or full-fat sour cream, stirred into each bowl at the table, is the traditional treatment and holds up better against the beets.
- Seasoning the broth"Highly-seasoned" here likely means bay, peppercorns, and a generous hand with salt rather than heat, though the recipe does not say. Season the finished soup again after the cream, which flattens salt.
Borscht reached American cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century largely through immigration from the Russian Empire, and books of this type — a dish a day, each labeled with a nation — tended to compress a whole cuisine into one representative recipe. The result here is recognizably borscht in outline: beef broth, beets, cured pork, and cream. What has been lost in translation is the sourness. In Ukraine and Russia the soup was traditionally built on a fermented beet liquid (kvas buryakovy) and finished with smetana, and it is that acidity that gives the dish its character; the fennel seed here may stand in for dill, which is the herb the soup is usually associated with. The word borscht is generally traced to an older Slavic name for hogweed, a sour plant used before beets became the standard base.