I still have an image of her in our trim Moscow kitchen, phone tucked under her chin, shredding the carrots, cabbage and beets on a clunky box grater right into our chipped enamel family pot. My mother was inordinately proud of her hot, super-quick vegetarian version. Personal borsch, on the other hand, brought out every Soviet mother’s and grandmother’s sweet ingenuity – although to me it all tasted kind of the same in the end. Institutional borsch with its reek of stale cabbage was to be endured at kindergartens, hospitals and workers’ canteens across the 11 time zones of our vast Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Our socialist borsch came in different guises. It was just there, a piece of our shared Soviet reality like the brown winter snow or the buses filled with hangover breath or my scratchy wool school uniform. Back in Moscow, in the politically stagnant 1970s, I never regarded borsch as any people’s “national dish”.
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