Ukrainian recipe: Remembrance Borsch (with yellow beets)

This recipe originated with Ukrainians in the United States. By the early 2000s it was becoming part of their Thanksgiving tradition.

This yellow-coloured borsch was intended to be served as the first course of Thanksgiving Day dinner. 

Since then, however, the Saturday after American Thanksgiving (i.e., the fourth Saturday in November) has become an official day of remembrance to commemorate Holodomor. 

This sad commemoration has created a very appropriate, and dedicated, occasion to serve this symbolic dish.

The borsch is always accompanied by a moment of silence. 

This moment of silence is in remembrance of the millions of Ukrainians who died in the Holodomor famine-genocide of 1932-33 and the following Years of Terror at the hands of soviet communists. 

As well, in remembrance and gratitude for those who survived, and for the family's own abundance today. 

The recipe is patterned after the meatless borsch served at Ukrainian Christmas Eve dinner, Sviat Vechir. It varies from family to family, but the one constant is the substitution of yellow beets for the red.

Yellow (also called golden) beets give the broth a golden colour. Yellow is a colour often related to mourning in Ukrainian culture.

To make Remembrance Borsch, start with a mushroom broth. If you can get them, used dried mushroom caps imported from Poland. (These are the closest to those that used to come from Ukraine before Chornobyl.) Otherwise, use a combination of Italian porcinis, Japanese shiitakes, or other flavourful species.

Soak dried mushrooms several hours or overnight. Wash carefully to get rid of any bits of sand or dirt. Strain the dark water through a coffee filter and add it to the salted cooking water for the washed mushrooms. Let it simmer several hours, adding more boiling water as needed.

If you’re pressed for time, the ready-made mushroom broth now available in supermarkets or delis will do.

To the broth, add chopped or shredded beets, chopped potato, carrot, onion, mushrooms, dillweed, a bay leaf, and season with salt and pepper. There are no rules, other than using ingredients that even the poorest peasant would have in his or her bit of garden.

Add your favourite vushka (mushroom-stuffed mini perogie-like dumplings), sprinkle with chopped fresh dill.

If you can’t find yellow beets, use a combination of white turnips and a parsnip (for sweetness). Colour the broth with a few strands of saffron, a pinch of turmeric, or as a last resort, a few drops of yellow food colouring.

If you don’t have the time or skill to make vushka, dried mushroom-filled Italian tortellini are a reasonable facsimile.

Don’t skimp on the fresh dill. (Make sure to use fresh, not dried dill weed or dill seed.) Most supermarkets carry fresh dill year round. As well, it can be chopped and frozen fresh for use later.

Whether or not you are celebrating American Thanksgiving, this is an excellent symbolic borsch to serve during Holodomor Remembrance week wherever you are in the world.

This recipe and the accompanying information came by email from Peter Borisow, of the Hollywood Trident Foundation. 

It has been presented on Nash Holos Ukrainian Roots Radio by Judy Hrynenko (here) and the late Sylvia Molnar (here). These features have aired every November for the past several years in honour of Holodomor Remembrance. 

Please feel free to incorporate this ritual dish into your American Thanksgiving and/or Holodomor commenorations, and share the story with others. 

If you would like a proper recipe for Remembrance Borsch, with proportions, I have shared one which was adapted from my award-winning entry in the 2015 Borsch Competition in Victoria. Story and recipe here. 

My Excellent Adventure at the 2015 Borsch Fest in Victoria

Had a wonderful time at the 2015 Borsch Fest in Victoria, BC on Saturday, November 07!

One of the organizers, Maria Koropecky (who was interviewed on the Nov. 4 edition of Nash Holos) challenged me to enter the competition, so I did.

I was honoured (and, quite frankly, astounded) that my entry won the People's Choice Award ... and also Judges' Honourable Mention.

Came home with a cash prize (which covered the cost of ingredients and gas for the drive down to Victoria) for the People's Choice Award. For the Honourable Mention, I received a copy of a great cookbook by one of the judges, Cinda Chavich, The Waste Not, Want Not Cookbook: Save Food, Save Money, and Save the Planet.

The theme of this book is especially poignant, as Ukrainians tend to abhor wasting food, given how often throughout history, especially during the soviet era, it was denied them.

Along with Cinda, the other judges were Lee Aitchison,Hospitality Management Instructor at Camosun College; and Michael Tymchuk, producer of CBC's food show The Main Ingredient.

The borsch I entered was not the typical beet red that most people associate with borsch. That's because it was made with yellow (golden) beets.

It's called Remembrance Borsch, in honour of the Holodomor, the soviet-engineered famine that deliberately starved to death 7-10 million Ukrainians in 1932-33.

The colour yellow is symbolic of mourning in Ukrainian tradition, so that's why this borsch is made with yellow beets. 
  
I've been sharing the story of Remembrance Borsch with listeners of Nash Holos Ukrainian Roots Radio for several years now. If you're not familiar with it, and would like to be, check out this blog post.

For anyone who tasted my Remembrance Borsch at the Borsch Fest and would like to try making it, I am very sorry but there is no recipe proper (as in with proportions). And I am unlikely to ever reproduce the batch I made (with the help of my friend Gerri) as I didn't keep track of the proportions I used.

However, I will share what I remember, to the best of my abillity. The rest is up to you. Which is kind of fitting, because by nature Ukrainians are very individualistic and independent ... and that is in large part why the Soviets tried to wipe them out, by starvation and other gruesome methods.

November is Holodomor Remembrance Month, and the last Saturday of November is set aside as Holodomor Remembrance Day. At sunset, candles are lit in remembrance of those who perished in this heinous, man-made famine. To me, it's very important to make this borsch and remember the millions of innocent victims, so that never again will human beings be starved by the millions merely to promote an ideology. 

This recipe for Remembrance Borsch should create a reasonable facsimile of the one I made for Borsch Fest.

8-10 cups shredded or diced yellow beets
5-6 cups shredded cabbage
3 cups finely chopped onion
1-2 cups chopped fresh mushrooms
6 cups diced potatoes
5 cups diced rutabaga
2 cups shredded carrots
2 cups chopped fresh dill
1/4 lb. butter
3 Tbsp salt
2 Tbsp black pepper
3 litres mushroom broth
1-2 litres beetroot broth
2-3 Tbsp lemon or lime juice

Saute the mushrooms, onion, half the cabbage, and half the dill in butter until the veggies are a nice golden colour.

Put them in a large stock pot, along with the liquids, seasonings, and the rest of the veggies, except for the beets. Simmer until the potaotes and rutabaga are soft, about 1/2 hour.

Add the shredded beets, and gently simmer for about 1/2 hour.

NB: Make sure the borsch does NOT boil vigorously. Borsch should never be boiled. It makes the beets lose their colour and just does something to the taste that is less than desirable. Keep it at a gentle simmer.

This will make a huge stock pot full, about 10-12 litres, so you might want to cut the ingredients in half. 

A tip for preparing the beets for borsch, especially using red beets: Scrub really well, trim off any blemishes, and put them to simmer, with the skin on. When soft, drain the beets and cool. Reserve the liquid. This will be your beetroot broth. When beets are cool, peel and shred. Adding the beets at the end will keep the beets from going white, so your borsch will have a nice, rich colour.

I hope that some day serving this yellow borsch to commemorate Holodomor Remembrance Day will be part of Ukrainian tradition. We should never forget.

If you decide to try it, I'd love to hear how yours turned out.

Meanwhile, here are some pictures from the 2nd Annual Borsch Fest in Victoria.

If you're interested in Cinda's cookbook, you can get it here:

Borsch is officially a dish of Ukrainian origin

But, apparently, not everyone knows that!

Recently I came across a recipe for borscht [sic], a traditional cold beet soup. It’s from The Book of Jewish Food by Claudia Roden, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 

The author describes it as a cool sweet-and-sour soup which was particularly popular in Lithuania, and is now one of the great Jewish standbys of the restaurant trade.

She does mention that there are lots of different Russian and Ukrainian versions of borsch (Ukrainians drop the "t").

Still, someone really should enlighten the author to the fact that it’s *our* soup. It even says so in Wikipedia!

As the grandaughter and great-granddaughter of Ukrainian immigrants, I was raised on borsch. Different kinds ... meat, meatless, with cream, cream-less, rhubarb, potluck, you name it. So I consider myself a bit of a connoissuer. And in my experience, borsch was always hot.

The first time I learned there was such a thing as cold borsch was when I was a young adult, still (relatively) fresh off the farm and living in Winnipeg.

I popped in to visit a new friend, who happened to be Jewish. When I rang her doorbell, I caught her noshing on (of all things) cold borsch ... straight out of a Manischewitz jar!

At the time what she was eating seemed as foreign to me as sashimi or goat curry (neither of which I’ve yet acquired a taste for).

For one thing ... who ever heard of store-bought borsch? Never mind cold, but with nothing but beets and broth yet. Not a shred of cabbage or beans or potato to be seen. Let alone chopped dill!

Besides, as far as I was concerned, the only kind of beets that came in a jar was the pickled kind. So ... cold borsch in a jar? That was just plain weird.

I’ve learned (and eaten) much since then, and there’s even a Ukrainian deli in my family now that sells the stuff ... the hot variety of course. (And it is the best borsch you have ever tasted!)

As for the cold variety, Sylvia Pidraziuk Molnar recently shared her recipe for chilled borsch on Nash Holos. It is one of over 200 authentic Ukrainian recipes that Sylvia (a retired Vancouver cook and cooking instructor extraordinaire) has shared with Nash Holos listeners over the years. You can find the recipe here.

Meanwhile, the Jewish version for cold borscht (borsch) that I came across is here. And if you'd like to check out the book, it's available on Amazon. Here's the info and title again: The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York.

Reading this article and the recipe brought back fond memories of my friend Marci, with whom I’ve unfortunately lost touch.

If we ever manage to re-connect I certainly hope that, in addition to the memories and catch-up stories, we will share a bowl of borsch.

Which version ... hot or cold, Jewish or Ukrainian ... well, only the future knows. 

Blender Dill Mayonnaise

Mayonnaise is as ubiquitous in Ukrainian cusine as any other European culture. It's indispensible when preparing fish, egg and salad dishes, for starters.

There's nothing like homemade mayonnaise, and when you have the time I think it's worth the trouble of making. We're lucky to live in a time when we have the option of buying it when we're pressed for time.

Sylvia's favourite substitute for homemeade mayonnaise is

The 1929 Ukrainian cookbook of Olha Senatovych

As mentioned in an earlier post, we’re presenting Nash Holos listeners and blog readers with a translation of the cookbook of one Olha Senatovych of Lviv, Ukraine, dating back to 1929.

It's really more of a journal filled with information and cooking tips that Olha gathered and compiled, perhaps with the intention of passing them on to her descendants. The recipes she included are both familiar and exotic to modern cooks who know all about Ukrainian cuisine.

Olha's original “cookbook” is hand-written, in Galician Ukrainian. (Galicia is a province in western Ukraine.) Her grandson in Lviv has kindly provided us with a digitized version — also in Ukrainian.

It all started out as a translation project for a writer’s group that Natalia Buchok (fellow contributor to Kobzar’s Children) and I belong to. A few of the members who are fluent in Ukrainian had a preliminary look-see and decided that it was definitely something worth translating and sharing with the world.

Natalka was fascinated with the book and , in spite of an already insane work and home schedule, decided to take on the translation.

Meanwhile, it occured to me that such an ongoing project would be perfect for Ukrainian Food Flair. Mindful of her crazy schedule, I nonetheless asked Natalka (nothing ventured, nothing gained, eh?) if she would be interested in sharing her translated treasured with Nash Holos listeners.

The "radio bug" bit down hard, and she agreed to host Ukrainian Food Flair on a bi-weekly basis.

Admittedly, it was a huge undertaking, and neither of us really had any idea how Natalia was going to find the time to do both the translation and the radio gig.

Enter another member of our writer’s group to the rescue. 

Mila Komarnisky, a native Ukrainian speaker and first-time published author, is our Angel of Mercy. With her novel, Wretched Land, finally completed and now in print, Mila was ready for another project and offered to help us out.

This frees Natalia up to focus on the radio presentation of the recipes as well as the valuable information and fascinating historical and personal anecdotes in Olha's cookbook.

In addition to the translation, Mila is also creating low-calorie versions of Olha's recipes, much of which rely on larger quantities of ingredients like cream, butter, bacon, and sugar than we’re used to these days. (It was written in the 1920s, after all!)

Many thanks to both Natalka and Mila for undertaking this fascinating project. I’m sure you’ll find our journey of Ukrainian culinary discoveries every bit as enjoyable as we do!

So stay tuned as Natalka presents Olha's recipes and Mila's low-cal adaptations on Ukrainian Food Flair every other week, and posts them here on the Nash Holos blog!

Ukrainian recipe: Dill Bread Express

Dill is a flavourful and highly nutritious herb common in Ukrainian cuisine, and other Eastern European cuisines.

Image: FreeDigtalPhotos.net

In North America dill is known primarily as a herb to enhance salmon dishes, and a major ingredient of dill pickles. 



But there is so much more to dill! 

A proper Ukrainian borsch contains copious amounts of dill. Combining dill with butter and/or cream results in a most heavenly sauce for potatoes, vegetables, chicken, and/or egg dishes.



It's best fresh, of course, although in a pinch you can use dried dillweed or dill seeds. I've been noticing it more often in supermarkets lately, so if you chop it up and freeze it you can enjoy it fresh year round.

Dill has been around since ancient times, and has some amazing medicinal qualities.

It was mentioned both in the Bible and in ancient Egyptian writings. Ancient Greeks and Romans considered it a sign of wealth and also revered it for its many healing properties. Hippocrates, the father of medicine, used dill in a recipe for cleaning the mouth, and soldiers in ancient times put burnt dill seeds on their wounds to promote healing

During the Medieval period, Europeans used dill to create love potions (!) and also to protect against witchcraft. People would carry a bag of dried dill over the heart as protection against hexes.

In today's world, dill protects against free radicals and carcinogens, and rivals garlic for anti-bacterial properties. It is a good source of dietary fibre, as well as minerals such as calcium, manganese, iron and magnesium.

So don't scimp on the dill! It's a delicious way to eat healthy.

Here's a quick and easy alternative to garlic bread that Sylvia shared recently on Ukrainian Food Flair on Nash Holos Ukrainian Roots Radio.

Dill Bread Express

1 loaf of French bread (or Italian)
1/2 cup soft butter
2 Tbsp. finely chopped fresh dill

Cut the loaf in half lengthwise. Mix dill with soft butter and spread generously on both cut sides. Put both sides together and wrap in foil. Bake at 400ºF for about 15 minutes. Serve warm.

This is a great make-ahead that can be frozen.

Smachnoho!

Ukrainian cuisine: Exploring traditional recipes and cookery from 1929

Оn Sunday May 22 Ukrainian Food Flair co-host, Natalia Buchok of Oakville, Ontario made her radio debut on Nash Holos Ukrainian Roots Radio!



A writer who speaks fluent Ukrainian, Natalia has embarked on an ambitious journey, taking Nash Holos listeners on a delicious trip down memory lane as she explores a fascinating piece of Ukrainian culinary history.

The roadmap for this trip comes via the Ukrainian to English translation project of a cookbook dating back to 1929. Entitled Універсальна Галицька Кухня (Universal'na Halytskia Kukhnia), it tramslates into English as Galician Kitchen.

We came across this book through Oleh Iwanusiw, a member of an online writing group that Natalia and I belong to.

Oleh has an acquaintance in Lviv, Ivan Lutchuk, who happens to be the grandson of Olha Senatovych, the book's author. Ivan also happens to actually have in his possession the very hand-written cookbook his grandmother compiled!

Written in the beautiful Galician Ukrainian vernacular of that time, it has traditional recipes for everything from fish dishes to tortes, and even instructions on how to keep your kitchen vermin-free!

Having learned about this incredible treasure, our writer's group decided it was just too wonderful not to share. So with Oleh's and Ivan's permission, Natalka is doing the Ukrainian to English translation, and in the process sharing her culinary discoveries with Nash Holos listeners.

Very little is actually known about the author, however. From photos Ivan sent us, we do know Olha was beautiful and fashionable. She obviously came from an upper or upper middle class family, in Lviv, western Ukraine. 



She lived for a while in Vienna, and was an artist at a time when women were just being officially admitted into the great art schools of the West, such as the Academy Julian and the Ecole des Beaux Arts in France.

And, based on her book, she was no doubt an adventurous cook and highly competent homemaker!

While the 1920s were a time of political instability and upheaval in western Ukraine, they were nonetheless a heady time for kitchens. New inventions and innovations in kitchen design swept Europe (particularly Germany and Austria) and soon made their way to North America.

Presumably Olha had a modern kitchen. It was probably painted Venetian green or Pale Organza. She likely had built in wood cabinets that sat flat on the floor instead of on legs, with a work counter, aluminum drawers with oak bins for storing flour (oak repels meal-worms), and a garbage drawer for scraps.

For appliances, she might have had a Kitchen Aid mixer (they were around by then) and a gas burning stove, although probably without a thermostat on the oven (she doesn't give any temperatures in her recipes). Although refrigerators had already been invented, Olha likely was still using an icebox.

The recipes in her cookbook are quite sophisticated. Many clearly reflect the influence of Vienna, the capital of the Austro Hungarian Empire which had ruled western Ukraine prior to the end of WWI. The Austrian nobility routinely brought in French and Italian chefs to cook for their banquets and celebrations. So the luxury and festive style of the dishes prepared by these foreign chefs soon began to influence Ukrainian dishes - modern variations of which are prepared in Ukrainian homes today.

Natalia will be sharing many of those recipes on Ukrainian Food Flair every other Sunday on Nash Holos Ukrainian Roots Radio. So make sure to join her on her exciting culinary journey!

Recipe: Ukrainian Sauerkraut Soup with Buckwheat (Kapusniak)

Buckwheat is very popular in Ukrainian cuisine as well as in Japanese, Jewish and others, but not particularly in North America, where it’s used mainly as flour for pancakes.

This “grain” (which is technically classified a fruit) is chock full of goodness and very low in calories. It’s an excellent source of protein, trace minerals, fiber, amino acids, and vitamins, including the entire B spectrum.

Ukrainian Food Flair is back on Nash Holos!

Vancouver's well-known and beloved foodie Sylvia Pidraziuk Molnar has returned to the airwaves! Her first return feature aired on the May 8, 2011 edition of Nash Holos Ukrainian Roots Radio. 

Sylvia will be alternating weeks with Natalia Buchok, who made her radio debut on Sunday, May 22, 2011.