Alissa Timoshkina's Borsch
This author, chef, film critic and mother re-imagines traditional Soviet recipes she grew up on
This week, Russian food creative Alissa Timoshkina tells us how her bath used to be full of mushrooms, why she celebrates New Year’s Eve over Christmas Day, and her love for dill. Plus shares her favourite heritage recipe: Borsch.
This weekend, you can celebrate Valentine’s or Galetine’s Day, cooking Caribbean Classics with Christiane.
You end up with a feast of Brown Stew Chicken, Rice & Peas with Coleslaw, desperate to travel to Martinique and a lover of Zouk music.
Alissa is a (fairly) recent mother. Dill reminds her of an incident ”during that crazy postpartum phase when your hormones are all over the place”. It was also a phase when she’d forget to take care of herself. She’d forget feeding herself. One evening, as she was cooking, the scent of the dill infused her powerful memories of childhood—of feeling secure and being fed. It was a primal feeling that made her cry. It reminded her of the responsibility to feed the new and little life but also of the responsibility to feed herself. (Alissa now runs MotherFood, a cooking course teaching ways of nourishment for soon-to-be-mothers).
No wonder then, when we asked Alissa what home smells like, she said almost instantly: “Dill”.
“I remember we’d have our first picnic as soon as the sun had warmed the ground enough so you can sit on it—around April or early May. It was still cold, so you’d still dress up quite warmly. Yet, sunshine filled the skies”.
The Soviet regime was atheist and fiercely anti-religious. Christmas was banned. Instead, people transported the usual Christmas festivities and feasting to New Years’ Eve. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia is religious again (quite a bit, actually). But people still have a reverence for New Year’s Eve.
Food, unsurprisingly, was the biggest element of the festivities.
Setting up feasts was a challenge. Food supplies in Soviet times were sparse. It was difficult to find ingredients you fancied. There was long and patient queues waiting for empty shelves to be re-filled. Yet, a situation of sparsity made the feast special. There was a child-like excitement about accomplishing it.
“I remember my mother and my grandparents buying canned green peas. It was a rare delicacy. We’d scout them as early as August (or whenever they could find them) and put them in a special cupboard. Together with all the other rare ingredients, the peas waited for New Year’s Eve. Every now and then, through summer, we’d open the cupboard to marvel at them”.
Alissa says, proudly, that even in London she preserves the excitement and a sense of sacredness around the New Year Eve feast.
Alissa grew up through the 1980s and 1990s—as the Soviet Union fell and vanished. In the early 90s, she saw Russia’s post-soviet world getting filled with new and imported food as borders opened to the West. “It was a dramatic, radical change to our lifestyles and our food and diets”, she recalls. When she moved to the UK, she found the shift to be even more staggering. In London, even as she feels home in a supermarket overflowing with commodities, the Soviet child in her marvels at the variety.
If dill is how home smells, perhaps a jar of mushroom is how it looks.
Mushroom picking was a huge part of Russian culture—especially during Soviet days. And especially if you, like Alissa, grew up surrounded by Siberian forests. When the season was right, Alissa and her grandfather (who she refers to as a “mushroom connoisseur”) picked up heaps of mushrooms and could fill a bathtub. In fact, they literally filled a bathtub with them. Alissa would then bring old toothbrushes to clean off the leaves and dirt.
This surreal scene, of a bathtub-filled mushroom filling the home with the smell of forests, stands out in Alissa’s memory.
Our question was the same as yours. What does one do with a bath full of mushrooms?
Preserve them. It was a culinary tradition to preserve and store mushrooms in various forms.
Alissa remembers this to be a very precise and very fiddly process. Her mother and her grandmother sterilised jars. They closed them as tight as they could, and hid them under heavy blankets. This was a way to keep them from exploding. Many jars were infused with herbs (including, of course, dill), making them look like tiny forests.
As a child, Alissa was enchanted by these rows and rows of jars of mushrooms—some exploded and oozed. These jars were pickles, and were the supplies for next year.
Alissa’s earliest food memory is of the Georgian treat Churchkhela. Three-year-old Alissa and her family visited Sochi—a resort town on the Black Sea. Because it was close to the Caucasus, producers from that region brought their food to the local markets. And here, amidst fresh fruit and vegetables, hung salami-like sweet tubes Churchkhela. These are walnuts tied together via a string coated in a mixture of flour and concentrated grape juice and air-dried. When hung, grapes melt, drip and encase the walnuts in a sweet and chewy wall.
“When the Soviet Union collapsed, almost overnight, we had access to all sorts of different food. When my mother asked my great grandmother if she craved a particular food, she chose black olives. So we got her a can. She was thoroughly disappointed. She said it tasted nothing like the ones she had as a kid—picked from the huge wooden barrels they’d kept in the cellar of their house. She was born in Ukraine, coming from such a plentiful place must have been like moving to a parallel universe for her.”
Kulich, a classic Easter Bread, is traditional in Russia. Families made it to gift to neighbours and friends. It looks a lot like Panettone but it’s not as airy or bubbly. Like Panettone, however, it too needs a lot of kneading and proofing. Alissa’s great grandmother (who, in many ways, raised her) woke up in the middle of the night to do one of the many kneading sessions. Alissa remembers seeing her glide into the kitchen, in the middle of the night, in a white gown. The dough would pulsate through the huge blue enamel pots, leaking and overflowing, as her grandmother worked through it. “It was like witchcraft”, Alissa says.
We asked Alissa what role the older generation in her plays in her cooking. “A huge role”, she answers, before very quickly changing it to “it is everything”.
The culinary styles of the women in Alissa’s family represented the historical periods of the 20th century.
Alissa’s grandmother has a simple but classic repertoire of recipes. Yet, she managed to cook such delicious food out of simple ingredients that you wouldn’t want anything else. Her mother, on the other hand, came of age during the 1970s. Like her contemporaries, she too was obsessed with the west—finding secret ways to get chewing gum. Her cuisine too reflected this desire. She didn’t quite like the simple Soviet recipes and tried to Europeanise them as much as possible.
Alissa’s sits comfortably in the middle, marrying two approaches. She blends classic traditional Russian with a better selection of ingredients that weren’t available in Soviet times.
Alissa is grateful. Every now and then, she pauses to appreciate the privilege of her access. Unlike, her parents and grandparents, who lived through an unbelievably harsh political regime and through a palpable lack of materials, she is able to walk in and out of different culinary experiences.
Alissa’s Recommendations
We asked Alissa what she’d recommend we listen to while cooking the Borsch. She suggested the Russian stringed musical instrument (балала́йка), but then said that could seem a bit cliched.
She did, however, suggest two movies (Alissa, by the way, holds a PhD in Soviet film studies).
First, her favourite: Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky. The atmosphere in the movie, alongside the wooden huts and solitary nature, is a portrait of Russian rural life.
Second, the national classic, The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath! A popular Soviet comedy that isn’t very known in the West. It is a cult classic that is a must-watch on New Year’s Eve—sometimes playing as a background score.
The Recipe (serves 4, 60 minutes)
Alissa warns us that it is problematic to claim Borsch as a Russian dish; especially in the backdrop of geopolitical tensions between Russia & Ukraine. But its complex and fascinating history is part of why she loves it so much. Borsch is a soup made with beetroot.
This particular version of Borsch—red, rich and irresistible—is one of a kind. This is Alissa’s version, from her book Salt and Time. This is yet an example of how she uplifts everyday traditional recipe to gourmet experience.
Ingredients
1 large onion
1 carrot
6 medium beetroots (raw)
2 red bell peppers
2 tbsp of tomato paste
2 litre of cold water
2 bay leafs
1 tbsp of black peppercorns
1 tbsp of coriander seeds
1 tbsp of fennel seeds
4 cloves of garlic
a bunch of dill
a small bunch of parsley
1 tbsp of salt
1 jar of fermented cabbage (preferably red)
1 tin of red kidney beans
2 tsp of smoked paprika
1 medium red onion
1 tbsp of brown sugar
2 tbsp of pomegranate molasses
2 cloves of garlic, minced
4 tbsp of sour cream
4 tbsp of chopped dill and parsley
unrefined sunflower oil for frying and roasting
additional salt to taste
Steps:
Finely dice the onion, peel and grate the carrot. Heat up a tbsp of sunflower oil in a large pot and fry the onion and carrot for about 8 minutes until golden.
Meanwhile, peel and grate two beetroots, thinly slice one red pepper, remove the seeds, and add the vegetables to the pot together with the tomato paste and a splash of water. Season with salt to taste and fry for another 5-8 minutes.
Top with 2 litres of cold water, add the bayleaves as well as all the seeds, peeled whole garlic cloves, and half of the fresh dill and parsley. Season with a tbsp of salt and bring to boil.
Lower the heat, add half of the fermented red cabbage with its brine and let simmer on low heat for 40 minutes to an hour.
Switch off the heat and let the borsch rest for another hour, while you prepare the rest of the elements. If you can make the broth 24 hours in advance you will be rewarded with an even better tasting soup, but a few hours of resting will also do the trick.
So far, so good, but here is where the recipe starts to deviate from the norm quite a lot
To prepare the vegetables that will grace the plate and also add extra flavour and texture to the soup, you will need to do a bit of roasting.
Start by preheating the oven to 160C.
Peel the remaining 4 beetroots, cut into wedges and dress with oil, salt and a dash of pomegranate molasses. Peel the red onion, cut into wedges and season with salt and brown sugar to bring out their sweetness and promote caramelisation. Roast in the oven together with the beetroot for 30 minutes.
Next, drain the kidney beans, dress them with salt, oil and smoked paprika. Deseed the red pepper and cut into thin strips, dressing with salt and oil. Roast the two together as they will only need 10-15 minutes.
When ready to serve, strain the broth through a sieve or a muslin cloth, discarding the boiled vegetables. All we need is that rich broth!
Reheat again if necessary.
Next, we will create layers of texture and flavours in each bowl by adding a heaped tbsp of raw kraut to each, as well as a handful of roasted beets, onions, kidney beans and peppers.
Top each bowl with hot broth and add a dollop of sour cream and a generous sprinkle of fresh dill and parsley. The intensity of the flavours and textures of this dish is beyond words, while the look of the bowl will seduce the eye without a doubt.
Show us how it comes out @joindiaspo
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Last week, we celebrated Lunar New Year with Loretta. Get your step by step video and recipe to turn dough into dumplings: