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Borsh, Polonaise
Place in an earthen soup pot a two-pound piece flank of beef, pour in four quarts water and season with a light tablespoon salt, place pot on fire and as soon as it comes to a boil skim fat from surface. Cut head and feet off a small duck, neatly draw and wipe, place on a tin, spread a little butter over breast and roast for twenty-five minutes. Remove and add to soup pot with a quarter-pound piece raw, lean bacon, two each carrots, leeks and parsley roots, two branches celery, one onion, two peeled beetroots, a sprig thyme, bay leaf, two cloves and a teaspoon allspice. Place lid on and let simmer for an hour and a half, skim off fat once in a while, then add a smoked sausage, let continually simmer for thirty minutes and lift up all ingredients from pan. Cut a carrot, a beet, a very small piece of pork and small piece of beef in julienne strips, cut sausage in small slices and place all in a soup tureen. Skim fat from surface of broth, then strain it through a double cheesecloth over the ingredients in the soup tureen and serve. N.B. Keep duck for to-morrow's luncheon and balance of beef and bacon for further use.
A grand-hotel borsch: a clear beet and beef broth built on a whole roast duck and served strained, with only a little julienne garnish in the tureen. The recipe assumes a kitchen that can absorb the leftover duck and beef elsewhere, which is why the yield looks so extravagant.
- The hinge: colourBeets simmered for two hours give up their pigment and the broth is likely to turn brownish-amber rather than red. Cooks who want the ruby colour of a Polish barszcz grate a raw beet, steep it in a little of the hot strained broth off the heat, and add that juice at the end; boiling it again undoes the effect.
- AcidityAuthentic barszcz is sour, traditionally from fermented beet kvas. Nothing here supplies that, so taste the strained broth and correct with lemon juice or a splash of red wine vinegar before it goes to the table.
- The duckTwenty-five minutes in the oven is a colouring stage, not full roasting, and the note at the end explains why: the bird finishes its cooking in the pot, flavours the broth, and is then lifted out whole for the next day's cold luncheon. "Neatly draw" means gut it; supermarket ducks arrive drawn.
- Parsley rootA pale carrot-shaped root sold in Eastern European and some farmers' markets, not the leaf. Parsnip is the usual substitute, though it is sweeter; use one small parsnip for the two roots.
- Smoked sausageIn a Polish context this means kielbasa — a coarse, garlicky smoked pork sausage. It goes in only for the last half hour so it perfumes the broth without going grey and washed out.
- Raw lean baconHere "raw" means uncooked rather than pre-cooked; a piece of salt pork or pancetta is closer to it than the thin smoked rashers sold as bacon today. It is there for body and fat, and is retrieved for later use.
- Vessel and heatThe earthen soup pot can be any heavy stockpot; the point is slow, even heat and a broth that never gallops. Keep it at a bare shiver so the strained liquid stays clear, and skim as the recipe insists.
- SaltA "light tablespoon" for four quarts is deliberately restrained, because the bacon and smoked sausage salt the pot as they cook. Season properly only after straining.
- YieldFour quarts of water will reduce somewhat over the two hours' covered simmering; expect enough for eight to ten servings as a first course. Sour cream and a boiled potato or small dumplings are common Polish accompaniments, though this version is served plain.
Barszcz is the Polish member of a family of sour soups that runs across Poland, Ukraine, Russia and Lithuania, and the name is generally traced to an older sour soup made from fermented hogweed rather than beets, with the beet taking over as the souring vegetable in the early modern period. What appears here is the restaurant version of that peasant lineage: the fermented kvas is gone, replaced by roast duck, bacon and smoked sausage, and the whole thing is strained through double cheesecloth into a tureen so that the garnish sits in a clear broth — the professional idiom of hotel cookery around 1900, where a national dish was recognisable by its ingredients but rebuilt to the standards of the consommé station. The closing note to save the duck for tomorrow's luncheon is the tell: this is a recipe written for a household or hotel kitchen that costed its stockpot carefully and expected one bird to appear twice.