Borscht - Other Regional Recipes

Other Regional Recipes

There are local variations in the basic borscht recipe:

• In Armenian cuisine, it is served warm with fresh sour cream.
• In Azerbaijani cuisine and Iranian cuisine, it is served hot and it usually includes beets, potatoes and cabbage, and optionally, beef. One soup spoon of plain yogurt is added on top, as typically served in Azerbaijan.
• In Belarusian cuisine, the tomatoes are standard, sometimes in addition to beets. It is usually served with smetana (Eastern European-style sour cream) and a traditional accompaniment of pampushki (sing. pampushka), small hot breads topped with fresh chopped garlic.
• In Chinese cuisine, tomatoes and tomato paste are used instead of beets, in addition to beef, cabbage, potatoes, and carrots. It is similar to the Russian beet-based borscht.
  • In northern Chinese cuisine, particularly in and around the city of Harbin in Heilongjiang province, an area with a long history of trade with Eastern Russia, the soup known as hóngtāng ("red soup") is mainly made with red cabbage.
• In Doukhobor cuisine, the main ingredient is cabbage, and the soup also contains beets, potatoes, tomatoes and heavy cream, along with dill and leeks. This style of borscht is orange in colour, and is always eaten hot.
• In East Prussia (now parts of northeast Poland and Kaliningrad, Russia), sour cream (schmand) and beef is served with the Beetenbartsch (lit. beetroot borscht).
• In Lithuanian cuisine, dried mushrooms are often added.
• In Mennonite cuisine, borscht is a cabbage, beef, potato and tomato soup flavoured with onions, dill and black pepper. This soup is part of the cuisine absorbed by Mennonites in Ukraine and Russia. Mennonite "summer borscht" contains beet leaves, potatoes, dill, and sausage. It is made with a pork stock, usually made by boiling the sausage contained in the soup.
• In Romanian cuisine, it is the name for any sour soup, prepared usually with fermented wheat bran (which is also called Borş), which gives it a sour taste. In fact, Romanian gastronomy uses with no discrimination the words ciorbă, borș or, sometimes, zeamă/acritură. One ingredient required in all recipes by Romanian tradition is lovage, which has a characteristic flavour. Romanians usually call the traditional borscht made from beetroot borș rusesc (Russian borscht) or ciorbă de sfeclă (beetroot borscht sour soup).
• In Ukrainian cuisine, it can be a vegetable soup or based on either chicken or other meat bouillon. Traditionally borshch is served with pampushki and smetana. Main ingredients include specially prepared red beets, potatoes, carrots, beans (e.g. broad beans, green runner beans, butter beans or other varieties), celery, fresh or dried mushrooms (optional), herbs (e.g. fresh dill and/ or parsley), chopped cabbage, chopped fresh tomatoes or tomato sauce.