by Charles Troob
Cut a piece of chuck roast into chunks. Put it to boil with onion, carrot, salt and pepper. Skim. Scrub a bunch of beets and add them to the pot. Turn the flame down. Settle into a nice long book. Stay close enough to the stove to enjoy the rich smells. After a hundred pages or so, start checking the meat and the beets. When they finally begin to get tender, smoosh a small can of tomatoes and toss them in. Read for another half hour. Remove the beets and put them on a plate to cool. Add half a cabbage, coarsely chopped. Check your email and make a few phone calls. When you can handle the beets, peel and mince them, and throw them back in. Don’t pick up the book–your hands will be bright purple.
The garnet-colored broth is robust but delicate, and slightly sweet. Grandma added sour salt—citric acid—to balance the flavor—but lemon juice is fine. The vegetable mixture is hearty and comforting. The moist and luscious beef is a revelation. (In Vienna I twice ate the famous Tafelspitz [boiled beef]. In comparison to borscht meat it was dry and insipid, barely worth the chew.)
Grandma sometimes served this borscht with piroshki, flaky pastries filled with an addictive blend of chicken and chicken liver. They live only in my memory. But the shimmering jewel box in a bowl is legacy enough, and so easy to do.
A taste of borscht brings back my grandparents and the many family meals at their home. When I was a little boy it was a house—a house, not an apartment!—is Jamaica, with hydrangea out front and a nearly lifesize photo of my mother as a little girl at the top of the staircase. Later they moved to an apartment near us, in Forest Hills, where before dinner my brothers and I would look out at Grand Central Parkway far below, with magical patterns of headlights heading toward the city line and to Manhattan.
After a round of chopped liver and Ritz crackers in the living room, the meals always began with soup. Grandma’s wonderful chicken soup was more usual than borscht, but borscht was common enough, and more distinctive—it taught us about our particular heritage.
My mother’s family came from Akkerman in Bessarabia, a province bordering on the Black Sea. Akkerman—now called Bilhorod-Dnistrovs’kyi—is near the western edge of Ukraine, and much of Bessarabia is the independent country of Moldova. But when I was growing up, this entire area was part of the Soviet Union, and when Grandma was young it was in the Russian Empire.
My grandmother knew Yiddish—and spoke good though accented English—but thought of herself as a native Russian speaker. She’d earned a diploma from the local high school, called a gymnasium in Russian. She could not attend classes there—they limited Jewish enrollment—but she studied at home and could take the examinations. Despite the antisemitism—and a horrendous pogrom she lived through as a teenager—most of Grandma’s recollections of the old country were suffused with nostalgia. She spoke rapturously about the beautiful Russian language and about the rich black soil of the region. And she proudly talked about Odessa—forty miles from Akkerman—as a fascinating center of culture, though I have no idea how often she went there.
A regular guest at our family gatherings was my great-aunt Manya, thirteen years younger than Grandma. (A third sister, Nina, lived in Washington with her husband Lazar, a former Menshevik who worked for the Voice of America.) Manya thought of herself as a member of the intelligentsia—she and her long-dead husband had been friendly with many distinguished expatriates, Jewish and Gentile–and she looked down on Grandma as provincial and semi-educated. They fought frequently and loudly: e.g., “Papa loved me best.” “No, you’re wrong, he loved me best.” (At this time Manya was in her sixties and Grandma in her seventies.)
One particularly heated argument—it almost came to blows—was about Alexander Nevsky, a historical figure immortalized in a classic film by Eisenstein. Grandma insisted that the story took place at the time of Peter the Great and his war with Charles XII of Sweden. Manya said she was crazy, and Alexander Nevsky was a much earlier figure than Peter. We could look this one up. Manya was right.
When I moved to Chelsea in the 1970s, I was only a few blocks from Aunt Manya, who lived in London Terrace on West 23rd Street. My grandparents had died by then, and I took over the family responsibility for attending to my great-aunt. It wasn’t a burden: she was excellent company.
Manya was eager to teach me Russian. I got a first-year college text; with her I worked through the first dozen chapters, enough to read some poetry and to understand finally why Grandma had called it a very rich language and was so proud of speaking it correctly.
And like her elder sister, Manya loved to put food on my plate and watch me eat. She didn’t make borscht, but she did make a fish soup, called ukha, with mackerel, which I enjoyed very much.
As for the borscht, Grandma had given me the recipe, and when beets were in season it was time for me to spend a few hours evoking her memory. I once served it to my father and my older brother. They ate it but I can’t say that the experience meant much to them. Fortunately my partner John, with his Slavic roots—his parents were Croatian—had similar food tastes to mine. He loved soup, and beets—and he adored my borscht.
This piece was written for David Grogan’s memoir study group, in response to a prompt about food and memory. It was a pleasure to write it and to share it with my colleagues.
