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BORTSCH (Russian Soup)
Take a beetroot, a leek, a celery root, some parsley, and an onion, and shred into pieces of equal size; add a little curled cabbage cut in the same way, and fry the whole in a saucepan. When done to a nice light colour stir in three pints of good stock, and a ladleful of beetroot juice. Add a young duck which has been three parts roasted beforehand, about two pounds of slightly broiled breast of beef, and a bunch of herbs composed of marjoram, two or three dry mushrooms, a bay-leaf, and a clove. Boil gently until the duck and the beef are quite cooked, then take them out of the soup, cut up the duck in the usual manner, and cut the beef also into large dice. Then take out the herbs, skim the soup and flavour it well. Add a mixture composed of half a soup ladle of sour cream, mixed with the juice of two red and well-scraped beetroots and a good pinch of chopped and slightly boiled fennel and parsley. Add the pieces of duck and beef to the soup before serving. Probable cost, 5s. 6d.
A grand hotel-style borscht built on two meats and finished with soured cream. Nothing here is difficult, but the sequence matters: the acid and the cream go in off the heat, at the very end.
- The hinge: the second beet juiceThe soup is coloured and soured twice. The first ladle of beet juice goes into the simmering broth; the second, squeezed from two raw scraped beets and stirred into the cream, is added after the pot is off the boil. Cooked beet juice turns brownish, so the raw addition at the end is what gives the finished bowl its red colour and its fresh edge.
- Do not boil the creamHalf a soup ladle is roughly 2 fl oz. Slacken it with a little hot broth first, then stir it in with the pan off the heat. Boiling sour cream in an acidic broth will curdle it into grains.
- Beetroot juiceGrate raw peeled beets and squeeze through muslin, or use a juicer. A ladleful is roughly 4 fl oz, though ladle sizes vary. Bottled beet juice works for the first addition but is usually too sweet and heat-treated for the finishing mixture.
- Quantities and unitsThree pints, imperial, is about 1.7 litres, which is barely enough to cover a duck and 2 lb of beef; use a narrow deep pot, or expect to top up. "A celery root" is one celeriac, not a head of celery. Curled cabbage means Savoy.
- Three parts roasted, slightly broiledThe duck goes into a hot oven until the skin colours and it is about three-quarters done; the recipe specifies no temperature. The beef is seared under a hot grill or in a dry pan. Both steps are for flavour and for rendering duck fat, not for cooking through. Skim the pot generously once it comes to a simmer, or the soup will be greasy.
- TimingBrisket or breast of beef needs 2 to 2 1/2 hours at a bare simmer; a part-roasted duck will be done in 45 to 60 minutes and should come out first, or it shreds to nothing.
- Dried mushroomsTwo or three dried mushrooms in a bundle of herbs were most likely dried boletus (porcini), the usual dried mushroom of Polish and Russian cookery. They add savoury depth and are worth sourcing rather than substituting with button mushrooms.
- Yield and servingRoughly enough for 8 as a first course, or 6 as a meal. Serve the duck joints and beef dice in the bowls with the broth poured over, with rye bread; the 5s. 6d. probable cost is Victorian, when a duck and 2 lb of beef were a considered expense.
Borscht is a soup of the Slavic east, its name generally traced to an older word for hogweed, the sour plant that flavoured the soup before beetroot took over; the beet version, soured with fermented beet kvas, became standard across Ukraine, Poland and Russia. This is not the peasant version but the restaurant one, which is why it appears in Cassell's under the grand foreign entries: a compilation dictionary of the 1870s recorded what a competent English cook might be asked to produce for a fashionable dinner, and Russian dishes were fashionable in the decades when French chefs were serving dinner a la russe and Russian court cookery had a certain prestige. The doubled beet juice and the sour cream finish gesture at the tradition, where the sourness is said to be the point of the dish; the young duck and the two pounds of breast of beef are the hotel kitchen's idea of how to make a peasant soup worth 5s. 6d.